Streaming platform Disney Plus has more than 50 million subscribers, an increase of 22 million users in the last two months. Yahoo Finance’s On The Move panel discusses.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: And we of course have seen a lot of things shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, including theme parks like Disney World and Disneyland. On the flip side, a lot more folks are signing up for Disney+. The company just announced it saw 50 million subscribers over the past five months. The shares, by the way, are up by nearly 5% today.

Dan Howley's he's been watching this trend for us. You know, I don't know how much that offsets some of the declines in other parts of the business. But for Disney, it's probably welcome news.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, I mean, almost doubling the amount of subscribers they had back in February-- that's absolutely massive. And you've got to imagine a lot of this is likely coming from not only the launches in Europe recently that they had-- they did say that they were delaying in France because of issues with internet bandwidth capacity over there-- but you've got to think a lot of it has to do with parents that are at home with young kids, and they need to keep them entertained while they also work from home.

So this growth-- excellent for Disney. But you've got to also recognize that as productions are shut down on different projects across the globe, we might not see as many new offerings on this service going forward as we previously thought. So that could be an issue for Disney+. Fortunately, they obviously have that ridiculous back catalog that people can go through for years probably and not watch the same thing twice. So really impressive numbers here.

Netflix still doing very well. There are some analysts who think that they're going to see a big bump because of coronavirus. But again, another company that might be hit due to production issues. I'm sure everyone's still watching "Tiger King," though.

MELODY HAHM: Yeah. And Dan, if you think about that narrowing window and that new strategy, where "Onward" for example was in theaters, and then they were going to wait several more months to actually bring it onto the platform-- we watched it a couple of days ago, just because the chatter was there. And "Frozen 2," expediting that release online. I think Disney has a lot of power here, unlike Netflix, where there are a lot of familiar titles that people will gravitate towards no matter what.

We've seen all the late-night show hosts talking about how their children have watched "Frozen 2" 80 times in a row, and that's the only phone they want to see. So there's definitely that there.

And I need to point out that Disney+ did rollout in nine new countries, as I understand it, over the last two weeks. So this is not just growth domestically. This is a lot from India, from the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain. And a of these countries, as we know, have been hit hard by the coronavirus, so they're looking for ways to spend their time.

ADAM SHAPIRO: And in the long-term, though, don't discount the theme parks reopening. We saw the story yesterday about the steps that Disney is going to attempt to take to safeguard people when they return to the parks.

And we had a guest on in the last two hours said, look, people are going to want to go back to these parks. And the parks generated over $7 billion per quarter. I mean, it's the largest single generator of revenue for them. So you can't dismiss that.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, definitely not. Dan Howley, I also want to ask you about not just Disney+ or Netflix, but all of the other things that people are doing at home on the tech side, right? You've got people probably ordering Roku's right now if they don't have them already, video games. What kind of commentary have we been getting from these companies?

DAN HOWLEY: It really is just off the charts as far as people trying to stay engaged or entertained, active, talking to their friends and family. I'm seeing that with these kinds of services. Video games, you said-- the jump there has been absolutely incredible. We know-- I think last month or earlier this month-- March has felt like a whole year, so I don't know what month it was.

But we saw Italy actually said that the amount of people playing video games was causing a huge hit to their internet infrastructure. And that was around the same time we heard that Netflix was slowing down bit rate. YouTube slowed down bit rates around the world, just because so many people are online. It really is the only way that we can connect with people even down the block, since we're stuck in our homes.

I think the long-term of this story is going to be, yes, it it'll be kind of a bump for a bit. But I think we will see people stick around with these subscription services longer than you might have thought. So they'll end up having kind of a dropoff after people are allowed out again, but that it will remain steady for a while.

JULIE HYMAN: All right, Dan. Thank you very much. And thanks to all my colleagues here at Yahoo Finance for joining me for the last hour.