Disney+ has hit 100 million paid subscribers, just 16 months since its launch.
That puts Disney roughly halfway to catching up to Netflix's subscriber base, which is currently sitting at a lofty 204 million — but is growing much more slowly.
The pandemic has almost certainly accelerated the trajectory of Disney's growth, as we all ran out of things to watch pretty quickly, but even considering COVID the Disney+ performance has been remarkable. Hit shows such as The Mandalorian, and more recently WandaVision, have appealed to global audiences just as Disney was expanding into new markets.
Disney originally expected to have between 60 and 90 million subscribers by 2024, the company now expects more like 230 million subscribers by 2024.
Are you still watching?
As life slowly returns to "normal", it's going to be interesting to see if growth does slow down for both Netflix, Disney, and the rest of the streaming players — but what will be really interesting is how Disney approaches cinema and the box office. Historically they haven't really had to weigh-up whether to release movies straight to streaming, or to run them in cinemas first (or both). Figuring out the optimal revenue strategy is probably going to be a fun job for some data nerds over the next few years.
Best of the rest
We've left Amazon Prime Video off of this chart, as Prime is such a bundle of different services that it's hard to compare, but for the record they have 150 million subscribers. Hulu has just under 40 million, and then there's a smattering around 10-20m (HBO Max, CBS, Discovery, ESPN).
