The family-oriented Hollywood giant is betting that more adult programming will help increase the number of subscribers – at the risk of brand confusion.
When Disney launched the Disney + streamer in November 2019, it had global recognition from Luke Skywalker, Iron Man, Moana and Buzz Lightyear to great effect. The service attracted 95 million subscribers in just over a year. Disney will soon find out what happens when characters like Olivia Pope, Betty Suarez and Jack Bauer invade their streaming party.
On February 23, Disney began adding adult-oriented programming to Disney + in markets such as Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the new streaming brand Star. The entertainment giant’s plan to introduce Star as a content center within Disney + alongside Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar and National Geographic is designed to help increase overseas subscriptions, but can also create confusion for the Disney brand + familiar.
“Everyone knows about Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar, but Star is a kind of nebulous general entertainment, so it’s much more difficult to have an obvious value proposition for people,” says Cowen entertainment and media analyst Doug Creutz. “I don’t know if having Star is going to encourage someone who wouldn’t have bought Disney + alone to buy Disney +.”
To increase the challenge, Disney plans to increase the price of Disney + to 8.99 in Europe and to 7.99 pounds in the UK (both are about $ 11), regardless of whether the subscriber intends to attend the show. Star’s new lineup, which will come from Disney- owned ABC Signature, 20th Television, FX Productions and 20th Century Studios.
By offering Star programming within the Disney + universe in many markets, Disney is transforming the service into a more direct competitor to Netflix, which – with hundreds of new releases each year – promises to have something for everyone. Disney is already rapidly catching up with Netflix, which has taken nearly a decade to build up a streaming subscriber base the size of Disney + today.
Disney also removed a page from the Netflix manual, investing in local content. On February 16, the conglomerate unveiled 10 original European series, spanning the drama, comedy and documentary genres, including a four-part French miniseries about the death of a young student in 1986 and an Italian mafia series told from a female perspective. Disney + plans to order at least 50 European originals by 2024.
“As a supercharged Netflix, they are following the same global strategy, but they are implementing it at a much faster speed,” said Guy Bisson, from Ampere Analysis, UK. “Netflix already has all of its subscriber growth – and 62 percent of its originals commissioned – coming from outside the US”
While Netflix continues to grow rapidly, surpassing 200 million subscribers in late 2020, analytics firm Digital TV Research estimates that Disney + will overtake the pioneer in streaming paid members in the next five years. (Disney believes it will have between 230 million and 260 million paid subscribers by the end of fiscal year 2024.)
Disney has shied away from mixing family programming with more adult fare in the U.S., where it operates Disney + as a separate service from the general-interest streamer Hulu. But Jan Koeppen, Disney’s president in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, says a survey of subscribers showed that they really wanted a broader content offering within the app. “Everyone said, ‘We love to choose.’ And the adults among them had a term they used to use: ‘We would love to have even more options’ for what they call the ‘time for me’ when children go to bed, ”explained Koeppen during a February 17 conference. press.
To address the wide range of viewers who may be accessing a family’s Disney + account, the company has strengthened its parental controls and will allow people to filter content based on age-specific content ratings.
Ampere’s Bisson sees a parallel between Disney’s global approach to combining Disney + and Star and its US strategy of bundling its various offerings – Disney +, Hulu and ESPN – into a single discounted monthly transaction. Bisson has labeled the strategy “composition” and expects other streamers supported by the studio – HBO Max from WarnerMedia, Paramount + from ViacomCBS and Peacock from NBCUniversal – to copy as soon as they are released worldwide. “It’s essentially reinventing the wheel,” he says, “doing with streaming what pay and cable TV did – grouping channels and services into a single discounted package.”
Peter Csathy, president of the CreaTV Media consultancy, hopes that the launch of Star will only mark “the beginning of Disney’s expansion of its Disney + subscription streaming service”, saying: “Ultimately, Disney + will be the center of much more than video. It will be home to all that is Disney and will offer different levels of service that offer a variety of benefits, including early admission to theme parks, ongoing Disney merchandise and more. “
Disney had considered the introduction of Hulu as its mass-market service worldwide, but concluded that the United States-based platform “has no brand awareness outside the United States,” according to CEO Bob Chapek. Star, in turn, takes its name from Star India, the media giant that Disney acquired in its deal with Fox that operates the popular streaming brand Hotstar in India and parts of Asia. (The Indian brand Disney + Hotstar comprises about 30% of the global Disney + subscriber base.)
But the launch of the Star will be more complicated than the launch of Disney +. The Star will not be offered in the United States, for example, because Hulu already performs a similar function. Meanwhile, in Latin America, the service will be offered as a standalone streamer called Star + and will include live sports. “They are trying to adapt the product to the market in the best possible way,” says Creutz, “and it is definitely not a single model for everyone”.
Georg Szalai contributed to this report.
This story appeared in the February 24 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe.