Disney owes a lot of its success as a company over the past year to its streaming platform, Disney+.
The service launched in 2019 and has been largely successful due to the popularity of the Star Wars show, The Mandalorian. But now, Disney has begun to roll out more original entertainment, with TONS of new series and films announced for this year and beyond. Now, it seems that Disney+ will eventually have more subscribers than streaming giant Netflix!
Digital TV Research shared its predictions for Disney+ and Netflix in a new report shared by The Hollywood Reporter. According to their research, they estimate that Disney+ will reach 294 million subscribers by 2026. This will outpace Netflix, which they expect to have around 286 million at that time.
However, just because Disney+ could have more subscribers overall, doesn’t mean they’ll be leading in most areas of the world. They will largely owe their victory to one country in particular — India. Digital TV Research estimates that India will have 98 million Disney+ subscribers and only 13 million Netflix subscribers.
Also, this change in subscriber count doesn’t mean that Disney+ will be making more money. Digital TV Research’s principal analyst Simon Murray said, “Disney+ Hotstar will roll out to 13 Asian countries by 2026. These countries will supply 108 million (37 percent) of the global Disney+ subscriber total, but only $2.62 billion (13 percent) of the platform’s revenues by 2026. Hotstar subscribers pay less than a third of the monthly subscription fee of their U.S. counterpart.”
We learned from Disney’s Q1 earnings call last week that Disney+ is now up to 95 million subscribers. With that kind of growth in less than a year and a half, it seems very possible that they could reach the projected numbers in the next 5 years.
We’ll continue to keep an eye on Disney+’s subscriber counts, as well as the latest information about new programming coming soon. Stay tuned to AllEars for all the updates!
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My family and I just started a subscription to Disney + yesterday. I haven’t watched anything on it yet but I plan on trying to watch something on it for the first time sometime today. Anyone have any good suggestions on what I should watch?