Disney+ will expand to 42 new countries over the next two months, making the juggernaut streaming service available in 102 nations.
While Disney+ still lags a fair way behind Netflix’ 190 country reach, the service only launched in November 2019, marking rapid expansion.
From May 18, the service will be available in South Africa. On June 8, Disney+ will roll out in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
On June 14, the service will hit Albania, Andorra, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, and Vatican City.
Israel will get access on June 16.
With this expansion comes a cost increase. Disney CEO Bob Chapek promised shareholders the volume of available content will double, therefore softening the price rise.
“We needed to essentially double our production output,” Chapek said in an earnings call.
“We certainly have less content than we want. But as we’ve said over the last few earnings calls, that will rectify itself in the second half of this year. We’ve already reached one of our two goals. One of the goals was to go ahead and ensure that we had a new title every week, and we’ve achieved that.
“By 2023, we want to get to a steady-state, which is even higher than we have right now. And I think that will give us the impetus to increase that price/value relationship even higher and then have the flexibility if we were to so choose to then look at price increases on our service.
“But it’s all about content, content, content.”
