Disney+ UK Launch Date Confirmed

Wonder how much of those were driven by the various Covid measures? Ie if we hadn't had to stay at home/shield/binge watch Netflix all day every day for weeks on end and we could all go to the pub/park/library/McDonalds instead, would the end result still be 73M? Probably not.

I seem to recall reading Disney+ was planned to almost certainly be a loss leader and take a while to attract a decent userbase for probably the best part of the initial 18/24/36 months. Could it be argued they "benefited" (for want of a better term) from the pandemic by launching in Europe just as we shut everything down?

Indeed all VoD services have undoubtedly benefitted from the 2020 perils and impositions. This nevertheless is stunning in it's scope. Apparently the ARPU is already running at $4 per month which is fine. So takings of $330M per month (just short of $4BN per annum less churn) is superb.

.... and to continue the 'Mulan' saga, It is now available on Apple Services for the normal £13.99 fee. It's availablity on Disney+ has been suspended before it arrives as part of the service in general on 4th December 2020.

Well now Mulan has become available to everybody and his dog on Disney+, having sat through it I think I would have been disappointed to have paid £20 for it.

I didn't "hate" it, a film has to be really really bad for me to decide its a pile of crap (I have an account on IMDb to rate and review stuff and I've never rated anything less than 2, and those was for a BBC Three "sitcom" and a TV movie), but it looked pretty if nothing else.

Would still like to find out how many people actually paid for early access to it though.

Some news about the Star launch - launches Feb 23rd, will operate as an additional tile on Disney+ carrying more adult oriented content in Europe/Australia/NZ/Canada, while in Latin America it will be a separate service tied in with the local ESPN.

Price for Disney+ goes up to €8.99 pm.

https://www.deadline.com/2020/12/disney-star-international-launch-streaming-service-1234653438/amp/

From what I can gather having flicked through the slides on the Disney Investor Day website, the U.K. doesn’t seem part of the launch on Feb 23rd, which is sad but somewhat inevitable given the various content rights issues there must be here.

Wouldn’t we fall under Europe? I know not part of EU but we are part of the European continent?

I was hoping and thinking the same, but the slide doesn't include the UK sadly. I was trying to upload a screenshot of the slide but I can't seem to get the uploader to work - here's the link to them instead, the one I'm referencing is Slide 31: https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/app/uploads/2020/12/Disney-Investor-Day-2020-Slides-121020.pdf

The use of ‘Continental Europe’ was rather telling to be honest - as well as the graphics omitting us from the map!

One issue with the U.K. is that Disney licensed Sky the 20th Century pay tv window earlier this year when they struck the D+ deal and the BBC have their deal with multi-year deal with FX (so would be, depending on release date, the eventual home for the new Alien series) - the lack of them doesn’t prevent them launching it but they are fairly big omissions for the Star platform.

Edit - https://lumiere-a.akamaihd.net/v1/documents/twdc_investor_day_star_fact_sheet_bcaead9c.pdf

The fact sheet does mentioned a U.K. price increase so perhaps we’ll see it in some fashion outside of certain first window content.

Good news! It seems the writer of this article has had it confirmed by Disney that Star WILL launch in the UK on 23 Feb - judging by his replies to comments underneath the article who are similarly confused by Disney's presentation yesterday:

https://www.cordbusters.co.uk/disney-star-coming-to-the-uk/

In some ways I'm surprised that they haven't used the well known '20th' brand as the new sixth tile as it's instantly recognisable and all their inherited content from 20th Century Studios (films and TV) could have been brought together there, rather than launching a pretty much unknown new brand to most consumers in the UK. I guess it gives them more flexibility as a place to shove any other random stuff by calling it 'Star'.

Remember it won’t just be 20th Century - it’ll be Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, Buena Vista Releasing, FX and Hulu Original as well as 20th Century, 20th Century Fox and Searchlight... also a lot of 20th Century content has been subsumed in the Disney Plus catalogue so ‘Star’ is as you indicate does work as an overall catch-all for general entertainment content outside of the other brands.