For the first time, the Walt Disney Company is offering some insight into how many customers are streaming content from its streaming services with advertisements.
On Wednesday, executives said around 157 million streamers around the world are streaming content with ads across the company’s three services — Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus — a figure that includes 112 million customers in the United States.
The figure was released at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and separately outlined in a news release issued by Disney Advertising. The company said its count involved customers who stream at least 10 consecutive seconds of content on an ad-supported tier of the service.
“Disney sits at the intersection of world-class sports and entertainment content, with the most high-value audiences in ad-supported global streaming at scale,” Rita Ferro, the President of Global Advertising at Disney, said in a statement. “We wanted to be the first to offer our industry greater transparency into the methodology used to estimate our engaged global ad-supported monthly active users.”
Separately, an executive with Communication Research Inc. on Wednesday said Disney Plus will soon support the HDR10 Plus (stylized as HDR10+) standard. The announcement was also made during CES, with Communication Research executive Marc Finer speaking on behalf of the industry group that certifies HDR10 Plus technology.
It wasn’t clear when Disney Plus will support the standard; it currently offers movies and TV shows with support for Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. Disney Plus joins a growing line-up of streaming apps to support the HDR10 Plus technology standard, which promises enhanced color and contrast on supported TV sets, monitors, tablets and phones. Amazon’s Prime Video, Apple TV Plus, Hulu and YouTube already support the standard.
