Even though Apple TV+ is debuting the same month as Disney+, Disney CEO Bob Iger said he is not worried about his competitor’s lower price point — and he expects you won’t care about it either.
“We’re not really worried about competition in terms of pricing because we have such a unique product,” Iger told CNBC’s The Exchange on Tuesday. “We’re very, very different than any other service that’s out there.”
Disney+ debuts on November 12 at $7 a month, while Apple plans to debut its Apple TV+ on November 1 at $4.99 per month. Even though Apple comes in at a lower price, it’s debuting with only eight TV series. Disney+, on the other hand, is starting with more than 600 TV shows and movies, including Star Wars, National Geographic content, classic Disney movies, and new original content created just for Disney+.
Subscribers can expect new series like The Mandalorian, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a much different take on the popular Disney Channel original movie, a Lizzie McGuire revival starring an adult Hillary Duff, a short-form Muppets series, and reality programming such as The World According to Jeff Goldblum.
Iger told CNBC that the company would focus on its streaming service going in the future as the streaming wars heat up.
“There’s a whole other audience out there and there’s this migration that’s not going to slow down, it’ll going to speed up, in the direction of direct-to-consumer over-the-top services,” he said.
Disney won’t only be competing with Apple: NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia have also announced streaming services that will launch within the next year, adding even more choices to the already crowded streaming service market that includes industry leaders like Netflix and Disney-owned Hulu.
Disney+ is off to a great start, though, as Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne projected that it could have 13 million subscribers by the end of 2020.
It might already be guaranteed millions of subscribers is through a new partnership with Verizon that was announced on Tuesday, October 22. The partnership allows all new and existing Verizon Wireless customers on unlimited data plans to receive a year of Disney+ at no extra cost. Roughly half of Verizon’s existing 100 million wireless customers are eligible for the deal
