It should come as no surprise that the Streaming wars have now well and truly started. Many large companies are either making their own services or partnering with other companies either with their own or working on their own, to try and give you everything you want at the minor cost of never actually owning any of their content again, data collection, and a small monthly fee on top of it. Though Australia has had Netflix for a while, and a collection of homegrown services like Stan to fill in the void created by other providers not bringing their content here, that does look to change thanks to the launch of platforms like Apple TV+, Disney+, and upcoming ones like Hulu and potentially HBO Max. Though reviews of these services may come in time, I can at least review this one, as it was staring me in the face every day I went to work for a few weeks around the launch. So while I'm housebound anyway, may as well take a look at something slightly different this time, with my review of Disney+... that was late compared to everyone else but let's be honest, when has that ever not been an issue with this site?
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| (Would love a Fox category... just saying...) |
Starting with the launch lineup, and while it's a very strong selection of their content, even going so far back as to include the likes of Steamboat Willie, there are some noticeable gaps are depending on the series. I found it odd that The Proud Family show was not on the service, while the movie based on the show was. Same with the Muppets, the Muppet movies are here, but not the original show. At the same time though, there are many region-specific variations. By the looks of it, Australia was actually in a pretty good spot, as some movies being held up in licencing in the US are available here. As I couldn't find many sources very easily, I went through the CNet video on Youtube, going through the few placeholder spots they've found on the US version, and saw that all of them were available here. Something tells me that it's because of places like here in Australia that the placeholder icons are on the US platform, with messages like "Coming June 2021".At the same time, there were holes inside shows themselves, one glaring one to me being the two-part pilot of Ducktales 2017 when I went to do a quick check of it
There are however some issues on the more technical side of the platform. For the purpose of this review, I mostly focused on the web browser form of Disney+, as it allows me to get screenshots more easily. With this though, I noticed some performance issues, as the site appears to be very CPU and RAM dependent, at times burning through almost half of my computer's CPU when trying to play Avengers Endgame. Comparing this to Netflix, which has been an optimized service for me so far. Other Netflix comparisons are very easy to make, and none in favour of Disney+, with things like title sorting being a complete mess at times, thanks to being undecided about calling stuff Disney's *insert title here* or just *insert title here*. No option to marathon the Marvel Cinematic Universe in order, as going to the main Marvel subsection of the service, the first eight MCU movies displayed were Avengers Endgame, Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Thor Ragnarok, Captain America Civil War, Avengers Age of Ultron and then The Avengers. A massive example of this is The Simpsons, which many of the services from their last streaming platform are currently missing, including things like the ability to watch all the Treehouse of Horrors episodes in a row. Even small things like the ability to press the space button to pause or resume playing something feels like a missing feature due to it not working consistently, and I can't help but wonder why.
Like with a lot of streaming services, a constant and reliable internet connection is required for an ideal experience, and during testing, my router decided to have some problems, bringing to light how the video player handles less than ideal situations regarding connections. To put it bluntly, not very well. I had to restart Endgame several times because of network dropouts either skipping sections of the video and not letting me rewind to play it properly, or just outright giving up trying to buffer. Though I could bring up minor issues, like the rather bland loading screen of videos and the Android App (I said I mostly focused on the web browser, not entirely), and the locking of pre-made avatars that no one else will see anyway so what was the point? The thing I keep coming back to time and time again is the question of "Is it worth it?"
For archives of content? While there is plenty here, sorting through it is a problem (I'm honestly surprised National Geographic got a dedicated sub-menu but Fox didn't), the content is, at least for the most part, there. Original exclusive content is lacking, but that's something that can be built on in time, and if the archive content was weaker, this would be more of a problem for me then it is now. In terms of the overall all experience though? There is still a lot of work to do, and I'm hoping that these issues get fixed sooner rather than later. Keyboard shortcuts, consistent sorting of titles, the content holes, even minor presentation touches that I'm surprised are missing from something made by a company that is normally proud of their attention to detail. It's why I can at least recommend it on a content level, if not a service level.
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