Disney+ Loses More Subscribers, But There’s More to the Story
Ever since Disney+ launched back in 2019, it’s been giving us a TON of content. We’ve seen new Marvel and Star Wars shows debut, Pixar movies premiere, and some really fun original series as well.
So, it’s understandable that a lot of people have subscribed to Disney+. The streaming service started out pretty affordable, and while prices have gone up, there is still a lot of flexibility on pricing depending on if you want ads or not.
For a while, Disney+ was seriously gaining on Netflix in terms of subscriber numbers. So, how are they doing now? Let’s find out.
Disney+ Subscribers
Today is Disney’s Q3 earnings call and it was just revealed that Disney+ now has 146.1 subscribers. This is a 7.4% decrease from the last quarter, which had 157.8 million subscribers.
Wall Street had expected Disney to report a smaller loss of 151.1 million subscribers, according to estimates from StreetAccount via CNBC.
The majority of subscriber losses were from Disney+ Hotstar. There was a 24% drop in users after it lost the rights to Indian Premier League matches.
Last quarter, Disney+ subscriptions actually saw a 2% drop down to 157.8 million subscribers. The majority of those losses were from an 8% drop in Disney+ Hotstar memberships — only 600,000 subscribers were lost domestically. The common factor here seems to be Hotstar.
However, there was actually an improvement at Disney+ in terms of money. This was due to a higher subscription revenue and a decrease in marketing costs which was partially offset by higher programming and production costs, along with lower advertising revenue.
Actually, Disney reported that 3.3 million subscribers joined Disney+ in the ad-supported tier in the past quarter. The higher subscription revenue was due to Disney+ Core subscriber growth and increases in Disney+ Core retail pricing.
But, the future is not looking too great for the streaming service at the moment. With both the writers’ and actors’ strikes ongoing, basically, every major production in the U.S. has been shut down.
So, Disney is not currently making shows and movies that are planned to release in the coming years, unless they’re using AI, which I personally do not think is going to work out in the long run.
This messes with almost their entire release schedule moving forward (except for the shows and movies that are completely finished, but those will run out!).
Will we see this impact Disney+ subscribers? We will have to wait and see. But, if there are long stretches of time when no new content is being added to the service, it would be totally understandable to see people cancel their memberships.
Plus, Disney has also been removing content from the service to cut down on costs, so we’re losing things that were supposed to be permanent fixtures of the service.
Stay tuned for more Disney news and updates.