Disney+

Scott Hardie | November 16, 2019
Has anyone signed up for this service? Do you have any thoughts about it so far, whether you've tried it or not?

Chris Lemler | November 16, 2019
I never heard of it. What's the catch or deal to it?

Scott Hardie | November 16, 2019
Ha! Disney has such overwhelming marketing campaigns that I figured everyone on Earth has heard plenty about it by now, so I'm glad to hear that they haven't reached everyone. :-)

I might be missing your sarcasm, but in case not: Disney+ is a new streaming service launched this week by Disney, similar to Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime. It has decades of Disney and Pixar films, plus lots of Marvel and Star Wars and National Geographic content, plus the entire run of The Simpsons and miscellaneous Fox films like Avatar. It has several brand-new exclusive shows like The Mandalorian set in Star Wars and (starting next year) some Marvel shows. Here's more info.

There's no catch per se; the price is reasonable and the launch-day bugs have been mostly resolved. But whether or not it's for you depends on how much interest you have in the content being offered.

Chris Lemler | November 16, 2019
okay Scott thanks

Samir Mehta | November 17, 2019
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Erik Bates | November 18, 2019
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Scott Hardie | November 19, 2019
We got Disney+ on day one. The service was shockingly buggy at first, but it has mostly been fixed now, although we do still get one persistent bug: Nearly everything we watch freezes about 1-2 minutes in; the video locks while the audio keeps playing. The only way to fix it is to hit the back button to go back 30 seconds and let it play again. I don't know if that bug is specific to PlayStation but I hope it gets fixed soon.

So far we've watched and enjoyed most of the modern short films on the service. (Pixar has a wealth of great shorts that you might have seen online, like Kitbull.) So far, The Mandalorian is pretty good, but it's so slow-paced and ambitious that I'm reserving judgment until I can see the whole thing. As theme park fans, we're really into The Imagineering Story, which is very well done and makes the most of its access and family connections. The World According to Jeff Goldblum is ok; a little bit of Goldblum's mumbling-gaga shtick goes a long way. We're enjoying The Muppets, the one-season mockumentary series from ABC that added adult innuendo to the usual Muppets humor; you can see why the show was too weird and off-putting to last, but some of the jokes are getting big laughs in our house. The National Geographic shows that we've watched so far tended to overexplain and repeat themselves too much for our liking, but we've only begun to sample those. We look forward to trying Encore and Marvel Hero Project soon. A hidden gem on the series is Disney Junior's Muppet Moments, a series of short films where Muppets interact with kids; it's cute and funny.

My wish list for the service:
- Sort shows with no new episodes to the bottom of the watchlist (and/or gray them out) until new episodes are released, so they're not sitting there active in my queue with nothing new to see.
- Release whole seasons at once. The weekly wait is such a nuisance! I forget plot details episode-to-episode. I could solve this myself by not starting shows until they're fully released, but Mandalorian spoilers are everywhere.
- Have some kind of way to mark myself "not interested" in a title, so that it stops popping up again and again as I browse.
- When I finish something and want to watch again, start at the beginning. I kept trying to play for Kelly something that I saw, and it kept starting a few seconds before the end, and I thought this was another bug until I realized what was happened and scrolled way back to the beginning.
- Remember where I left off in a series for me. They're working on this one.

For Samir and anyone else using it: Is there anything you wish it would do differently? Do you experience bugs? And what do you think of certain content?