Just the other day, as part of the marketing for the soon-to-launch Disney Plus streaming
service, Disney released a full list of every title that will be available to stream on launch day.
They Tweeted every single title as well as posted a 3 hour long video teasing everything
the service will offer.
A lot of people are already starting to think about what they’ll watch first, what they’ll
re-watch for the first time in years, and what they’ll check out for the first time ever.
It got me thinking, how long would it take to watch everything Disney Plus will have
to stream on day one?
I don’t like burying answers.
It’ll take a long time.
Watching every single film and television episode offered on Disney Plus on launch day
would take 3,931 hours, or 163.8 days.
If you treat that like a full time job, clocking in at nine and out at five, that would stretch
out to over 491 days.
Alright.
Video over.
Bye everyone!
Just kidding.
Let’s look at some ways those numbers break down.
Before we do though, let me offer a preface.
When it comes to television, these numbers make the assumption that every episode of
every show listed will be on the service.
That might not end up being the case, due to perhaps licensing issues with episodes
here and there or perhaps Disney will wait a while to put new seasons of current shows
up there, but I wanted to mention it either way.
These numbers also exclude six original Disney Plus shows and two original movies, of which
we don’t yet know the exact runtime.
Since Disney has announced that they’ll be releasing episodes for new shows on a weekly
basis instead of all at once, then we can at least estimate that in total it’s maybe
an extra nine or ten hours of day one content that isn’t accounted for.
OK so that said, let’s look at some of these numbers.
Splitting it up between television and film, the service is going to offer 501 movies on
day one and 132 television shows.
The movies will run a total of 757.6 hours long, or 31.5 days.
Just slightly over one full month.
As for television, those 132 shows will be comprised of 3,310 episodes, totaling 3,173.4
hours of content, or just over 132 days.
An average of one show per day seemed off to me at first, but it’s ultimately because
there are a number of shows that were a 1-3 episode mini-series, or short-lived shows
that never made it past 10 episodes.
In any case, in terms of pure hours, television will make up the lion’s share of the platform.
The longest film in their day one library will be the 1965 classic, The Sound of Music,
at two hours and fifty-four minutes long.
Shortest film gets a little messy because you’ve got made for TV films and direct-to-DVD
stuff, but if we’re looking at theatrical releases, the 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie clocks
in at just 63 minutes long, which beats out the original Dumbo by one whole minute.
Of course for television, the longest running series is The Simpsons at 31 seasons and over
664 episodes.
Now what I found interesting was the content distribution by decade.
Each following decade is longer than the previous one, which I suppose isn’t that much of a shock.
It gets a little harder to measure though when you consider some shows, such as the
Simpsons which is present in four decades.
So if we pull that show out of the list as an outlier, because let’s be honest, there’s
nothing quite like The Simpsons, you end up with a gradual increase right up until the
2010’s, when it skyrockets.
I think that happens for a few different reasons.
The easy explanation is that there’s just more content now then there was in the past.
Today we think of Disney as this international behemoth of a media company, but up until
the 90’s that really wasn’t the case.
They had plenty of cultural capital with Mickey Mouse and Disney classics, but in terms of
size, they were just a regular studio.
More importantly though, and this is also speculative, I think it’s a reflection of
when the media industry began to think ahead about streaming.
While it’s easy to assume that since Disney owns all of their content that they would
have no issue streaming any of it, that isn’t always the case.
When a studio licenses a third-party song or clip for a show, they usually have to specify
the details of how that show will be distributed.
It’s just a part of the business.
But it gets messy 20-30 years down the line when an entirely new form of distribution
is invented and they don’t have the rights to use the song or clip in that form of distribution.
Older television shows sometimes ran into this issue when it came to their DVD release,
because they were originally produced at a time when DVDs didn’t exist.
In some cases it meant the show couldn’t be released on DVD, and in others it forced
the creators to actually go back and take out the music.
Netflix really threw video streaming into the mix in 2007, and while Disney wasn’t
diving head first into that world right away, it was the kind of shift in media that forced
companies to pay attention to streaming distribution rights when they made new movies and shows.
So, personally, I suspect there’s just more content from the 2010’s with clear-cut rights
that make it easier to stream.
Whatever the reason, that skewed distribution of content doesn’t change the fact that
it’s still a lot of content.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about the value of all that media, at $7 a month for Disney
Plus, you’d be paying just under one fifth of a cent per month for each hour of content
on the platform.
However if you were one of the lucky ones to get the D23 Founder’s Circle promotion
which was three years of Disney Plus for $141, then you’re only paying one-tenth of one
cent per hour of content per month.
Now, the one question I can’t answer, If you are getting Disney Plus come November,
what are you going to be watching first?
Thanks for watching.
To offer full disclosure since I’m sure it comes off as otherwise, I was not paid
or compensated in any way by Disney to make this video.
I just have that much free time on my hands apparently.
Though, Disney, if you want to cut me a check I certainly won’t say no.
Call me.