It has now been over a week since Disney+, Disney’s new streaming service, launched to the public. The service is said to be “the vault” of the Disney movie and TV show catalog.
I did indeed sign up for the service on launch day and got the bundle that also includes both Hulu and ESPN+ for $12.99 a month. I’m not a huge sports fan, but I’ll take some football every now and then.
As for Disney+, I do think that it is a good idea and I’m surprised that it took them so long to go forward with a product like this. Everyone loves to stream their favorite movies and TV shows whenever they want, so why not put it on a streaming platform of their own instead of allowing Netflix, Hulu (before it was acquired by Disney), Prime Video and other streaming services fight for Disney movies and TV shows.
The first movie that I watched on Disney+ was Toy Story 2. Yes, it may seem odd to start there, but I had no worries about it then and still don’t. It was a movie that I had wanted to watch again for a long time, especially if you look into the abnormal history of the film.
The video quality is great and I can watch it the way I want to; in my own home, on my Apple TV and ad-free.
I also watched a couple of Disney Channel movies that had come out within the last decade. Again, the video quality was great, which is quite important for a service like this.
The new addition of the resume and restart buttons made the service better. However, I am surprised that those buttons were not featured in the first beta of using the service since they are pretty simple buttons to come up with. Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services have had them for years.
There was some news about the service messing with the old episodes of The Simpsons, making it so that users could only watch the older episodes in 16:9, which is typically used for TV shows and movies that are recorded in HD. Given that The Simpsons was on back in the late 1980s and all throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a lot of those episodes don’t have the HD animation.
Disney has said that the older versions of the series will be in their original 4:3 aspect ration by sometime in early 2020.
Another thing that I do not like about the service is that Toy Story 4 was not available to stream on day one. I know that the movie had just released on DVD and Blu-ray in October 2019, but I do think that people are simply waiting for it to go onto Disney+ and not buy the physical copy of it.
I personally have no interest in their original series, as I am not that fascinated by High School Musical or Star Wars‘s The Mandalorian, therefore, I have not spent any time watching them.
Still, the service does offer me almost my entire childhood to watch through, whether that is watching Toy Story, Wall-E or trying a show from the 1990s like Boy Meets World, it’s safe to say that I do like the service, hence why I have “invested” in it by having a monthly subscription to it.
Disney+ gets 3/4 stars from me. I like to think that once they have added Toy Story 4 and other content to the service, it is only going to get better from here.
Rating: 3/4 stars
