Update: November 12, 2020: Disney has confirmed that Disney Plus subscribers have now reached 73.7 million users worldwide. The numbers are currently as of September 30th, the end of Disney’s last fiscal quarter. The company had previously predicted that it would reach 60 million subscribers five years after the November 2019 launch date. Disney will provide additional updated numbers on the service on December 10th during an Investors Day.
Original article: November 13, 2019: Disney Plus officially launched on Tuesday and some users had problems with the new streaming service for a few hours. Now the company has announced why this happened. The number of Disney Plus subscribers has already exceeded 10 million users a day after the launch.
The statement (via The edge) shows that the Disney Plus servers have been overwhelmed by the influx of users. Today things seem to have calmed down a bit. DownDetector currently displays over 400 reports of Disney Plus issues. That’s still a long way from the thousands of issues reported early Tuesday.
Another report by analyst firm Apptopia claimed the Disney Plus app for iOS and Android made more than 3.2 million downloads on Tuesday. About 88.7% of these downloads were from the United States. The remainder came from Canada (9.1%) and the Netherlands (2.2%), according to the report. While there is some margin of error, using these app download numbers we can estimate that approximately 8.8 million Disney Plus subscribers came from the United States. For comparison: the competing service Netflix currently has around 60 million US subscribers.
Disney most likely didn’t have much direct revenue from those 10 million Disney Plus subscribers. Many of them certainly took advantage of the Disney Plus free offers. This includes the free year for all current and new Verizon Wireless Unlimited plan users.
Some analysts predicted that the number of Disney Plus subscribers would be between 10 and 18 million in the first year. Instead, the official Disney Plus subscriber base hit the low end of estimates in just one day. Those numbers will increase on November 19th when the service launches in Australia, New Zealand and Puerto Rico.
