Disney Plus hits 103.6 million subscribers in 17 months

From CNET: Disney Plus grew to 103.6 subscribers as of April 3, Disney said Thursday in its fiscal second-quarter report, up from just 33 million a year earlier. It added a total of 8.7 million more members since the start of this year, a period when its first Marvel original series, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, debuted on the service.

By comparison, Netflix, the biggest subscription video service in the world, has amassed more than 207 million global subscribers in the decade-plus since it started streaming. Disney Plus launched just a year and half ago, in November 2019.

But the latest growth marks a deceleration of Disney Plus' jet-fueled growth in its first year. Disney Plus subscribers were up 9.2% in the latest period compared with the previous three months. But Disney Plus' sequential growth had been stronger previously, up 29% and 28% in the two quarters before this.

Disney Plus has proved to be the standout success of the so-called streaming wars, a period over the last year and a half when seemingly every major media company (and some tech ones) rolled out their own streaming-video services. Disney Plus' growth has far outstripped that of all the new competitors from Apple, HBO, NBCUniversal, Discovery and others. One media analyst called Disney Plus "one of the greatest product launches of all time."

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