Disney’s brand new in-house streaming service Disney+ is now available in the United States with more countries to soon follow. This is in the same way that other streaming platforms were available in certain countries before others, such as Hulu in Canada being available before other places and Netflix being more popular in some locations rather than others. Packed with thousands of hours of content including exclusives (of which required Disney to release a three hour trailer for). Featuring original content such as the much anticipated “The Mandalorian”, “Lady and the Tramp” live-action, and others among it’s timeless classic library of TV series and film the streaming service makes an impressive first leap into the streaming war.

Disney+ is a 2019 video streaming service, it is produced and developed by The Walt Disney Company. It is currently available in the United States on multiple streaming devices in HD, HDR, and 4K formats with a full worldwide launch set between Fall 2019 and Fall 2021.

Following more than a year of hype and anticipation Disney’s over-the-top streaming service is now available. Priced at $6.99 per month, $69.99 a year, or $12.99 per month if you opt to bundle it with Hulu and ESPN+, the Netflix and Amazon competitor provides a near unmatched list of content from Disney’s illustrious library dating back to the 1940s up to 2019. With specified catalogs featuring general Disney, Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, and even NatGeo the sheer value Disney+ values in addition to it’s plans for original content launches in 2020 and 2021 makes it hard to not add to cord cutter’s more than already full group of services.

THE GOOD: When launching Disney+ you’ll find that it has a rather simple, yet effective UI screen as all decent streaming services should at this point. Disney were smart enough to simplify things by overall catalog categories. To give an example there’s sections dedicated to nothing but general Disney, Marvel, Pixar, etc. With many having sub-catalog groupings such as Disney Channel Original Moves Collection, Spider-Man Collection, etc. Admittedly, not all of the classics from Disney’s catalog are currently present. While the focus was more intended on some of Disney’s more old school, obscure cartoons and TV shows, some more modern examples such as American Dragon: Jake Long are surprisingly missing from the platform. That being said as with any streaming platform these shows and films will likely be rolled in over time. It could also be possible that Disney may have misplaced or lost the master tapes for some of these titles, or there are other issues holding up the release of this content which hopefully isn’t the case.

I haven’t seen much of the currently scarce original programming (upwards of about a total of twelve or so original pieces of content at the moment), but from what I’ve seen out of The Mandalorian and Lady and the Tramp (2019) it’s a solid door opener. The biggest issue with Disney+ from a content standpoint is that the next big original releases aren’t coming until well into 2020. Unless of course Disney has been working on some unannounced projects scheduled for the next four or five months the current lineup of originals will get old very fast. In regards to the classic content, I’d say about 80% to 90% of Disney’s overall catalog is here which is great for hardcore Disney addicts.

THE BAD: Disney+ unfortunately faced a handful of issues during it’s launch from customer log ins being denied due to demand, to multidevice log in not being accepted thanks to a glitch, to general issues with the content itself. Examples include missing episodes from TV shows (Darkwing Duck is currently missing the two part pilot episode), shows having episodes out of order (Ducktales 2017 among others), and The Simpsons not launching with HD re-releases of it’s earlier episodes. In addition to the above, I’ve personally experienced random buffering and content freezes. This was a pretty noticeable issue while watching The Mandalorian and Lady and the Tramp.

OVERALL THOUGHTS: Like every streaming service before it, Disney+ isn’t perfect out of box and there’s a ton of technical issues. Some will have more widespread effect than others and that’s commonplace for anything of this sort. That said, Disney+ is already a pretty hefty bang for your bucks experience. Though lacking in original content compared to most streaming services at launch, it’s strongest element is it’s historic library of classics and a handful of decent original content for launch. Otaku Dome gives Disney+ an 80 out of 100.