Disney+ Is Growing Much Faster Than Expected, Reaches New Milestone

Disney has announced a massive milestone for its streaming service. Disney+ now has now more 50 million paid subscribers around the world. The achievement comes after just five months in the market.

Disney executive Kevin Mayer said the company is "truly humbled" by the launch of Disney+. The subscription service is now available in more than 12 countries around the world, with the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland added in the past two weeks.

Disney also called out India as a particularly huge region for the service, tallying 8 million subscribers alone. The company did not share any other region's specific subscriber numbers.

Disney+ is now well ahead of its sister streaming service Hulu, which had 30.4 million subscribers by Disney's latest count. The new results for Disney+ are well ahead of Disney's (likely very modest) expectations, too, as Disney was expecting between 60-90 million subscribers by 2024.

The surge in subscriptions for Disney+ may be related to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, as more and more people stay home and are looking for TV shows and movies to watch. Also notable is that Disney brought Frozen II and Onward to Disney+ ahead of schedule, which also probably helped subscriptions jump.

Disney+ still has a lot of work to do to catch Netflix (167 million subscribers) and Amazon Prime Video (150 million subscribers), but it's definitely off to a very strong start.

There are more than 500 movies and 350 TV shows on Disney+, including all 30 seasons of The Simpsons.