There’s little question that Disney (NYSE:DIS) investors have been enthusiastic about the prospects for its namesake streaming service Disney+. The stock has soared 35% over the past year since Disney announced plans to compete with the likes of Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) and Amazon‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime Video.
The House of Mouse announced that Disney+ had eclipsed 10 million signups on the day the service debuted in November, but also said that it wouldn’t provide additional updates about subscriber data until it reports its fiscal 2020 first-quarter results in early February.
Wall Street is still keenly interested in the trajectory of Disney+, and there’s a growing mountain of evidence that the platform will hit its subscriber forecast well ahead of projections.
McTernan estimates that Disney closed out the year with 25 million users, a 20% increase from his previous forecast of 21 million. To put that into context, Netflix boasts 158 million subscribers worldwide, and it’s estimated that Amazon Prime Video has 96 million. The analyst is suggesting that Disney will close out fiscal 2020 (which ends Sep. 30) with as many as 39 million subscribers, putting the company on track to more than double analysts’ consensus estimates for 18 million subscribers.
Another surprising conclusion from the research is that Disney is gaining some converts at the expense of the competition. Among the Disney+ subscribers, a whopping 29% said they had unsubscribed from a rival streaming video service in order to sign up for Disney+, and 9% specifically noted they had canceled their Netflix membership.
