Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, is off to a hot start in its first week. It was just launched on Tuesday morning, but already has over 10 million subscribers. This milestone was reached despite some initial technical difficulties during the service’s first day.
By comparison, Hulu boasts about 60 million worldwide subscribers, while Netflix has 150 million. A big part of the early success of Disney+ is its extensive content, which includes several new original series such as Star Wars: The Mandalorian. In total, there are over 500 movies and 7,500 television shows offered by the service. It also checks in at a lower price that its streaming counterparts at just $6.99 per month.
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After its launch on Tuesday, many new subscribers experienced outages in trying to access programs on Disney+. The company issued a statement about the issues. “The consumer demand for Disney+ has exceeded our high expectations,” the company tweeted. “We are so pleased you’re excited to watch all your favorites and are working quickly to resolve any current issues. We appreciate your patience.”
Disney+ is also working to combat another possible issue it faces: password sharing. The service is fairly lenient on sharing. It allows four concurrent streams per subscriber and seven profiles.
“Password sharing is definitely something we think about,” Michael Paull, president of Disney Streaming Services, said. “We believe that consumers will see that value, and they’re going to act accordingly. They’re going to use those accounts for their family, for their household. That being said, we do recognize password sharing exists and will continue to exist.”
“We have created some technology that’s in the backend that we will use to understand behavior,” Paull continued. “And when we see behavior that doesn’t make sense, we have mechanisms that we’ve put in place that will deal with it.”
Netflix, Disney+’s biggest competitor, has also faced issues with password sharing. Netflix’s product chief Greg Peters discussed the issue last month. “We continue to monitor [password sharing],” Peters said during a quarterly earnings call. “We’ll continue to look at the situation and we’ll see those consumer-friendly ways to push on the edge of that, but we’ve got no big plans at this point in time in terms of doing something different there.”
While Disney+ is $6.99 on a month-by-month basis, viewers can save a small amount of money by signing up for a yearly contract, which is $69.99 or $5.83 per month.
