Disney+ Will Launch With a Fraction of Netflix’s Total Content Library

The House of Mouse put on quite a show last week, dominating social media conversation by simply tweeting a thread of every single title that will be available on the Disney+ streaming service when it launches on November 12th. This thread consisted of over 600 tweets and was spread out over the course of hours. The topic of Disney’s nostalgia-filled streaming library was trending all day following the thread, and it seemed like there would be no end to the amount of old movies available for customers at launch. However, when you really break down the numbers, the Disney+ library has just a fraction of the titles currently available on Netflix.

The folks over at What’s on Netflix crunched the numbers following the Disney+ announcement and determined that the current Netflix library currently contains more than 5,700 shows and movies. The count of titles available on Disney+ at launch now sits at 734. That’s just 12.69% of Netflix’s total library.

So Disney+ will have less than 13% of the content available on Netflix, at least when it first arrives. That number will grow over time, but it likely won’t ever come close to the massive amount of titles that Netflix is boasting, with more being added as time goes on. Fortunately, it was never the intention of Disney+ to compete with Netflix’s content totals.

There are two major factors working in Disney’s favor here. First of all, Disney+ will cost half the price of the most common Netflix subscription. At $6.99 per month, Disney+ will easily be one of the most competitive streamers on the market.

That leads us to the second, and perhaps most important point with Disney’s content numbers. Disney+ isn’t going for a quantitative strategy like Netflix. It’s all about the quality of the titles that are available. Netflix has a lot of movies and shows that no one has ever heard, and that very few people will ever watch. Disney’s goal is to make its entire library desirable by users. So while there will be less to watch, the hope is that everyone will have a greater desire to watch what’s available.

All that to say, these numbers may make it seem like Netflix has a big advantage, but they’re exactly in line with what Disney+ has been going for from the jump.