The coronavirus might have slowed economies around the world to a crawl but not all businesses are built equal. Streaming services have been given the chance to takeoff like never before and have capitalized on it to great success.
In little over a month, Disney+ has received about 54 million new subscribers in Europe alone and accounted for 7 exabytes (7516192768 Gigabytes) of internet traffic.
As it stands currently, Disney+ is responsible for 1.2% to 2.2% of all mobile internet traffic in North America and Europe.
This is particularly impressive given how new Disney+ is in the streaming video industry and how it has achieved impressive figures in a few short weeks.
When considering specific network protocols like (HyperText Transfer Protocol) HTTP, Disney+ has joined the top-10 mobile video applications in line with the data volume in all areas where the service is active.
As such, the future potential of Disney’s streaming service is a matter of great interest to all mobile operators as more and more consumers turn to streaming services for content.
A recent survey revealed that 41% of respondents would trade their multichannel cable or satellite TV service for services like YouTube, Netflix and Disney+.
John Giere (President of Enea Openwave) said: “Some operators in Europe’s hardest hit regions have already experienced twice the usual amount of peak throughput during the lockdowns. While most of the OTT traffic from the likes of Netflix and Disney+ is currently running over Wi-Fi, this additional video traffic will very likely shift to wireless as lockdowns are eased.”
He concluded: “There was already more OTT video traffic on mobile networks than ever before, even before Disney+ came along. Operators have to perform a delicate balancing act with available resources and not allow congestion to ruin the video experience for many. That requires the ability to detect and manage network congestion dynamically, rather than resorting to brute-force video optimization. The operators that have applied this methodology have seen significant reductions in RAN congestion and improved the video experience for subscribers.”
