Within five months of its launch, Disney+ has pulled in 50 million paid subscribers worldwide, the media giant announced Wednesday.
“We’re truly humbled that Disney+ is resonating with millions around the globe,” said Kevin Mayer, chairman of Walt Disney Direct-to-Consumer & International. “Great storytelling inspires and uplifts, and we are in the fortunate position of being able to deliver a vast array of great entertainment rooted in joy and optimism on Disney+.”
In the past two weeks, Disney+ launched in the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland. India got Disney+ last week, where it is offered in conjunction with the existing Hotstar service.
India pulled in 8 million of Disney+’s 50 million paid subscribers, the company said in a statement. The service will expand throughout Western Europe, Japan and all of Latin America later this year.
Disney+ premiered in November as the exclusive streaming service for much of Disney’s massive catalog of movies and TV shows, from Star Wars to Marvel movies to classic animated movies and Pixar titles. The service also features new content, like the Star Wars TV show The Mandalorian and original movies like Lady and the Tramp.
Last month, Disney released Frozen 2 and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker early on Disney+ to give people stuck at home by the coronavirus something else to watch. If you’re looking to sign up for the service, we have a few tips on what’s worth watching and how to join.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?