Disney+ Adds 7 Million Customers to End 2023 Fiscal Year at 150.2 Million Global Subscribers
It hasn’t been an easy year for Disney+. The streamer hasn’t made net subscriber additions since 2022, but that trend was finally reversed in its fiscal fourth quarter — Disney is one quarter ahead of most other companies in its accounting — which saw it increase its subscriber total by 7 million, placing its current total at 112.6 million users not counting Disney Hotstar subscribers in India.
Following the end of its fiscal third quarter in July, Disney+ had 146.1M users. Nearly all of Disney+’s losses in 2023 have come from India, where its loss of Indian Premier League cricket rights has caused a mass exodus of subscribers from the service.
Disney+ saw its domestic subscribers increase from 46 million following the previous quarter to 46.5 at the end of its 2023 fiscal year. Internationally — outside of Disney+ Hotstar in India — the streamer picked up 6.4 million customers, an 11% increase over the prior three months. Hotstar continued to see subscriber declines following the loss of cricket rights. It dropped from 40.4 million customers to 37.6 in Q4 2023. Disney reported having 5.2 million customers on its ad-supported tier, which launched in the U.S. in December of 2022.
The company’s general entertainment streaming service Hulu added 300,000 customers in the final quarter of fiscal 2023 putting it at 48.5 million paid users as of Sept. 30, 2023; this includes 4.6M on its live TV streaming service Hulu + Live TV. Disney’s sports-focused platform ESPN+ increased by 800,00 paying customers during Q4 to finish the fiscal year at 26 million paid users.
Collectively — and not counting for the obvious redundancies via The Disney Bundle — the company currently has 224.7 million streaming customers.
How Do Disney+ Subscribers Compare to Netflix, Max, Other Streaming Services?
Disney+ remains one of the largest streaming platforms in the world, but it isn’t the biggest. That crown still resides with Netflix, which is over 100 million subscribers larger at 247.15M users. Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming platform Max comes in third after Netflix and Disney+, having reported 95.8M subscribers in August; the company is due to unveil its next quarterly earnings report this week.
Disney+ remains well ahead of other services like Peacock, which unveiled in late October that it had 28M users. Paramount Global has yet to report numbers for its fiscal third quarter, but at last count it had 61M customers, far fewer than Disney+. Apple and Amazon do not report subscriber data publicly, so there’s no surefire way to know how many users Apple TV+ and Prime Video have.
What Were Disney+’s Biggest Moves of the Quarter?
The biggest story of the quarter for American Disney+ subscribers was the fact that its ad-free streaming tier, as well as the bundles associated with that plan all rose in price. The increase was first announced in August, and saw the price of ad-free Disney+ Premium increase from $10.99 per month to $13.99 on October 12.
Some of the biggest news from Disney this quarter regarding its flagship streamer had nothing to do with its American audience. Rather, reports began to surface that the company was investigating a sale of its Indian streaming platform Disney+ Hotstar. As noted above, Indian customers have been departing the streamer in droves this year to the extent that Disney had to revise its long-term subscriber projections for Disney+ downward. In late October it was reported the company could be closing in on a deal to sell its Indian business to Reliance Industries Ltd., an Indian media company with an ownership stake in the streamer that won IPL Cricket rights.
Disney+ subscribers in the U.S. should be prepared for the company to start cracking down on password sharing in the coming months. CEO Bob Iger confirmed that rules against account sharing on Disney+ were coming in 2024, and the streamer has already updated its subscriber agreement in Canada to reflect the fact that account sharing is a violation of its terms of service.
The service did see some domestic subscriber additions during the quarter, thanks to Disney's new carriage deal with Spectrum, the second-largest cable provider in the United States. Spectrum TV users now get access to ad-supported Disney+ at no additional cost to themselves as part of the deal, and Disney collects a prorated subscription rate for all of them from Spectrum’s parent company Charter Communications.
The company clearly wants more users for Disney+’s ad-free tier, which could be one of the biggest reasons it discontinued its GroupWatch feature in September. The feature gained popularity during the COVID lockdown, but has since dwindled in popularity, and now the company doesn’t see the need to keep supporting it.
Disney+ could look much different from a user perspective when Disney’s next quarterly earnings report rolls around. By then, the company will likely have launched its “one-app experience” combining Disney+ and Hulu, which will reportedly be ready for customers by the end of 2023. Disney recently agreed with Comcast on the terms under which the purchase of Comcast’s 33% share of Hulu will be completed, and that certainty will allow Disney to move full steam ahead on its Disney+/Hulu app.
Disney+
Disney+ is a video streaming service with over 13,000 series and films from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, The Muppets, and more. It is available in 61 countries and 21 languages. It is notable for its popular original series like “The Mandalorian,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Loki,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” and “Andor.”