Disney is putting all its marketing muscle into hyping its Disney+ subscription video service, meaning that launch day will likely be an extremely busy and possibility fraught time for the fledgling streamer.
But, the company sounds confident that it can deal with potential overloading and crashing stemming from the influx of subscribers when the service officially launches on Nov. 12. Michael Paull, president of Disney’s streaming services and former CEO of BAMTech, told The Verge that Disney is heeding the lessons learned from other streaming events like “Game of Thrones” on HBO Now and UFC pay-per-views on ESPN+.
“We’re getting big bursts. We’ve built capabilities to sustain that, both in terms of processing the transactions that all come in — in a very, very short period of time — as well as the streams,” Paull said.
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During this year’s final season of “Game of Thrones,” both HBO Go and HBO Now (which have run atop BAMTech’s platform) experienced problems possibility related to overloading servers. While it’s unclear if anyone one show or film on Disney+ will attract the kind of massive audiences that streamed “Game of Thrones,” Disney+ will likely be dealing with an entire day of heavy traffic.
Back in February, Disney CEO Bob Iger predicted that ESPN+ and BAMTech could continue to handle big subscriber spikes.
“ESPN+ operates on BAMTech's platform, which has proved to be reliably stable during peak live streaming consumption and easily handled the volume of more than 0.5 million people signing up in a single 24-hour period,” he said.
Disney has said one of its top priorities for Disney+ is to quickly scale the subscriber base. The company estimates that Disney+ will grow to between 60 million and 90 million subscribers by 2024.