The much-anticipated streaming platform from the House of Mouse - Disney Plus - finally launched yesterday, and as expected from the biggest entertainment company on the planet, the interface is slick, and playback is super smooth. There’s no hiccups to speak of so far from my perspective (it worked perfectly with Chromecast), though from what i can gather on twitter, other folks are experiencing momentary hang-ups and unresponsiveness due to the sheer demand for Disney Plus.
I guess even the biggest entertainment company on the planet can’t stress-test its platform properly before a launch.
Due to it being a normal work-day yesterday, I haven’t had the time to really delve into the enormous amount of content on Disney Plus. It’s wild to see the entire back catalogue of The Simpson - 30 seasons of it - available to stream; imagine binge-watching through all of it - surely whatever life you previously had will no longer exist. The complete seven seasons of Boy Meets World - the seminal sitcom of my childhood - is also available, which means i can finally delete my downloaded bootlegs (surely the statute of limitations have expired by now).
Similar to what MP3 did for music, it seems people are entirely willing to trade visual quality in return for convenience and ease of use when it comes to streaming. I for one can dig the minimalism of having one device to access all the TV shows and movies there is to offer, even if a high bitrate blu-ray version does look magnitudes better on a properly setup 4K TV screen. Indeed, the quality of streaming is “good enough”, much like how MP3 sound quality is good enough to forgo the hassle of swapping CDs for every album you want to listen.
And also like music, the future of television (and maybe even movies) is streaming, though I wonder how our respective internet service providers feel about the immense amount of bandwidth it’s increasingly using - especially once most of the content switches over to 4K resolution. I have a monthly soft-cap of 1 terabyte with Comcast, so that’s going to be a problem down the road because it streaming 4K for one hour requires 7 GB of data. Hopefully Comcast will make the consumer-friendly move and get rid of data caps altogether, but then again, this is Comcast we’re talking about.
Late last night I watched the first episode of The Mandalorian, the Star Wars series that’s headlining the Disney Plus launch. Not having watched any Game of Thrones, it is my first exposure to this new generation of TV shows with production budgets equal to major studio films. It’s quite amazing to see such quality and scale on the television screen, and The Mandalorian is rather impressive so far. The upcoming Marvel shows have movie-like big budgets as well, and it seems the defining line between television shows and theatrical films is quickly blurring.
Exciting times. I’ve subscribed to other streaming platforms before, but it looks like Disney Plus has and will have the goods to keep me hooked for a long time.
Look at these people lining up to buy dim-sum when other shops in Chinatown offer largely the same quality.