From just over a month since its European debut, mobile video traffic from new streaming service Disney+ has reached 7 Exabytes per month according to data from Enea.
On Tuesday (May 5th) Disney confirmed that it had secured 54 million subscribers – providing relief to parents with children off from school – and creating headaches for mobile operators who have to juggle the exponential demand for data during nationwide lockdowns.
The analysis of the traffic from Enea is based on live data gathered from over 40 networks globally. In North America and Europe, Disney+ currently represents 1.2% to 2.2% of all mobile video traffic. Netflix - which was launched in Europe in 2012 and a few years earlier in the US - accounts for 7% to 15%. As a new entrant to the mobile video ecosystem, Disney+ has achieved an impressive presence in just a matter of a few weeks. In terms of specific network protocols such as HTTP, Disney+ now features within the top-10 mobile video applications according to data volume across the territories in which the service has launched. As such, the future potential of Disney’s streaming service is a matter of great interest to all mobile operators.
The intensifying streaming wars and the meteoric rise of Disney+ mirrors the findings of a separate global study that was conducted by research firm Censuswide for Enea. The researchers interviewed 5,000 mobile subscribers across the USA, UK, Japan and the UAE. They found that 1 in 3 people (29%) were planning on subscribing to Disney’s streaming service.
