Debuting in November with 7,500 TV series episodes and 500 movies, new Disney streaming service Disney+ will have one of the smallest—and oldest—libraries among the major U.S. subscription VOD market, UK research firm Ampere Analysis found.
Including the first 30 seasons of The Simpsons—a bounty yielded from Disney’s recent acquisition of 21st Century Fox entertainment assets—the Disney+ TV catalog will be only 16% of the size of Netflix’s U.S. TV catalog, which has 47,000 series episodes, Ampere said.
Meanwhile, the Disney+ movie library—bolstered by the Star Wars and Marvel franchises—will be only 12% of the size of Netflix’s nearly 4,000 titles.
Related: Disney+ to Reach 25M Subscribers in North America by 2024: Research Group
Disney is debuting the service at a $6.99 monthly price, which is about half the cost of Netflix’s most popular programming tier.
Besides having a significant price advantage over Netflix, Ampere believes Disney+ also has Netflix beat on overall quality of its library.
In the Ampere-provided chart below, the research company suggests that Disney+ has one of the older content libraries in the U.S. SVOD business, with the average title produced between 2006-2008. The average piece of Netflix content, meanwhile, was produced around 2016.
However, in the lest data-driven metric of quality, Ampere ranks Disney+ content significantly higher—second only to HBO. Netflix is at the bottom of major SVOD services.
“Disney is focused on quality over quantity for the Disney+ launch slate,” said Richard Cooper, Ampere Analysis research director, in a statement. “Perhaps unsurprisingly for a new service, Disney+ will initially carry a significantly smaller line up of titles than the established U.S. incumbents – Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Every Disney title will need to guarantee an audience, but with the entirety of Disney and Fox’s library to choose from, that’s very achievable.”
