If you are like me, and many others, then you have also been counting the time until this day. Disney+ opens its doors, and the content will start streaming. Many will flock to The Mandalorian first. Others will first look through to see what content is available and have their childhood memories start flowing like Niagra Falls. The hope, of course, is that Disney will have the technical expertise in place to deal with any oncoming onslaught of bandwidth and server hits.
I first logged in through the website interface and found myself seeing an interface I can easily navigate, though also lacking in features I have come to know in many other video platforms. I found the interface seemed to be constant across multiple web browsers, under multiple operating systems. And while I was able to log in, when clicking on The Mandalorian, which was up and center in all of the browsers upon logging in, I was unable to get to the page to even see information on it, let alone the content itself. After waiting a bit, somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour, I was able to get to the information page but still was unable to play the video.
With a failure already in the books, I decided to try my luck with different content. I found quite a bit, including Sophia The First, which I mention here for later, and The Gummi Bears, which I have been talking to my children about recently with this Disney+ opening. While trying to watch The Gummi Bears I had the most success, but with issues here and there in the form of issues getting the data, video, from the servers hosting the content. And there were fewer issues throughout the day as I worked to watch the entire first season of The Gummi Bears.
Once I got back home I installed the Disney+ Application on my PlayStation 4. Upon looking through the content I found a few odd things, including Sophia the First was now missing, which I also now found missing on other platforms as well. Where did Sophia the First go? So I put on the first Little Mermaid Series episode and then the first episode of TaleSpin. While watching TaleSpin I noticed it was literally the first episode and not the beginning. I looked through and could not find the beginning of TaleSpin, aka “Plunder & Lightning”, not even in the Movies area. So, I wondered, what about the original DuckTales? As with TaleSpin, I found that DuckTales did not include “The Treasure of the Golden Suns” and it was also not in the movie area, though “Treasure of the Lost Lamp” was indeed in the movie area.
I leave the first day wondering if I have been hitting different content servers from different locations I have been today causing some of the differences in content including it either being available or not. I am also hoping that the content I consider missing will show up sooner rather than later. As I mentioned earlier I feel as though the interface is lacking in features, including ones not in other interfaces that I would like to see. These include being able to rate on a 5-star system, the ability to have each user login with their own unique username and password, and an ability to allow or deny access to individual pieces of content to others under the account.
Overall I had a good first day with Disney+ and hope that its content will grow.
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