Disney+ seems to have pulled off a big win as of this weekend. And it’s called Hamilton. We don’t know exactly how many people watched it from July 3rd-July 5th but the social media buzz is unmistakable. Disney+ downloads in the US were up by 72% this weekend. The increase number come via Apptopia which compared the numbers to data from June. Even more noteworthy, Apptopia only shows info on the downloads of mobile apps
which means that it doesn’t reflect Roku, Smart TV’s, Fire TV etc. And yes it could be that people just decided why not check out the service that has been on the market for months for the first time since it’s a Holliday weekend. But typically if you see a spike like that there is a very good reason. Game of Thrones always led to spikes for HBO Now and HBO Go. And just an educated guess here. We think it was Hamilton. According to Variety the app was downloaded 513,323 times globally, including 266,084 in the US. Disney+ already had more than 50 million subscribers as it was.
And since Disney is no longer offering a free week of streaming this means that 513,323 people paid at least one month’s worth of fees. Even if every single one of them cancel after a month and that is very unlikely Disney had a historic bump. And bot it was people cued up to take it the rest of its catalog. Odds are that people will stick around to take in more content whether it is working through the number of classic musicals also on the service or jumping in with the rest of its library before they know it Disney is going to have 60 million subscribers.
