Today Disney held an invite-only Media Showcase for Disney+ ahead of its launch in South Africa on 18th May.

We were in attendance and can report on some of what we saw, but first some disclaimers.

The first of these is that many of the topics and talking points of the event are not new at all and are simply retreads of basic details of Disney+ that have been available for years, simply reiterated for South Africa.

If this is your first time interfacing with Disney+ we recommend reading the main website for the service which covers all the basics. We’ll be leaving out much of this repetition for the sake of only providing the most interesting points of the showcase.

Secondly we covered the event in real time with the Twitter thread available here. Because Twitter is rather awfully formatted for these types of longer threads we’re bringing it to you here, but the tweets remain if you’d prefer to read it there.

By the way follow us on Twitter at @htxtafrica for more live event coverage in the future.

Finally, and this may be the most South African part of the proceedings, unplanned and unscheduled loadshedding cut us out of the livestream for around 20 minutes. If we missed anything important we’re surely cover it in the future as the theme of the event is that the 18th May launch of Disney+ is simply the start of things to come.

With all that in mind here are the highlights of the Disney+ Media Showcase:

• Disney boasts (as of February 2022) 129+ million subscribers and expects between 230 and 260 million by the end of the 2024 fiscal year, which will also be the “break even” point for the service.
• Encanto was the biggest movie launch on Disney+ overseas. This gives the company confidence in the platform (going forward) in South Africa.
• Disney recounts many successes in South Africa so far, including the top three movies ever in the country under its umbrella.
• The Disney+ experience has spent “months” being localised for SA. This includes: a mobile first approach, the ability to browse before subscribing, “elegant” UI and more.
• As we covered in the past Disney has partnered with MultiChoice to offer Disney+ on the DStv Explora Ultra.
• The direct to consumer system of Disney+ has allowed for a “more nuanced” approach to content creation with Loki and The Mandalorian mentioned as successes in this regard. Weekly release, two-episode premieres, full season drops, batch releases and more are all experiments in this flexibility.
• More content made in South Africa is coming to Disney+, with an estimated 60 shows by 2024 mentioned, and will be announced soon.
• The Disney+ local pricing, especially its launch discount, is again pointed out as offering a lot of value.
• Disney channels on DStv will not be affected by the launch of Disney+. These so called “linear channels” are still receiving new content too.
• Aside from “minor variations” global releases will happen at the same time in South Africa.
• At launch the only South African language supported for captions and subtitles will be English.

The quotation sections above can be attributed to Christine Service, the senior vice president and GM at The Walt Disney Company Africa (pictured above).

Service also answered the Q&A section at the end of the event which included our question about local language support mentioned above.