As you all may know by now, Disney+ got fully functional a little over a week ago. However, things did not turn out to be the way the new streaming service expected. On the first day of its official launch, 10 million subscribers faced outages as their servers weren’t ready to take on such a load. Needless to say, it was a bad start.
Now, for those of you that haven’t gotten a clue about Disney+, it’s a subscription based streaming service like Netflix and Hulu that has just launched. As suggested by the name, it is owned by Disney and it has all the Disney movies and TV shows that have ever existed. However, that isn’t all. It also has an array of other popular movies and shows as well, which means you won’t be missing out much on the choice of content.
It is also priced competitively with the base monthly package starting from $6.99/month. This makes Disney+ considerably cheaper than Netflix, which would attract potential subscribers. Maybe that is the reason why the turnup proved to be too much for Disney+ servers to handle so they crashed on Day 1.
Disney executives, upon being interviewed, said that they thought they knew how many people would subscribe and use the service but they were proven wrong as the response was overwhelming. Now that isn’t exactly a bad thing, more subscribers do mean more revenue. However, Disney+ is at risk of people being put off by the poor service and eventually unsubscribing.
From a subscriber point of view, you basically weren’t able to log in at all, the screen would just be stuck at the login. In case you were lucky enough to go past the login screen, you still wouldn’t be good as streaming was near impossible with endless buffering. You might have thought that maybe this was happening because of any third party operating system on which you were running the app but Disney’s customer division specified that “It had to do with the way we architected the app”.
The customer service spokesperson later added that “We’ve never had demand like we saw that day and what we’re continuing to see. There were some limits to the architecture that we had in place were made apparent to us that weren’t before”. The architecture that he’s referring to is called BAMTech technology and it was also the one used in streaming Game of Thrones’ premiere and finale episodes. It proved to be reliable over the years but it failed this time.
Before you all start basing Disney+ for their incompetence, you should know that things like this happen all the time when a service is overhyped before its launch. Not very long ago, the same happened with Call of Duty: Mobile when the servers crashed and people were stuck on the loading screen for hours. The problem was fixed shortly after and, since then, there haven’t been any issues with the app. We hope the same would go with Disney+ as it is a promising competitor to the all-mighty Netflix.