Disney+ to rollout in Europe amid coronavirus

Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous, Brian Sozzi and Heidi Chung discuss Disney+ and its campaign in Europe amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Today, we've got Disney+ rolling out in parts of Europe. What a time to do it, right? With a lot of people now just in lockdown staying at home, what are they going to watch? Disney is hoping they're going to watch them.

Heidi Chung is joining us now. Heidi, I understand they rolled out in the UK. I don't know if that was the first European country. But they're experiencing glitches there.

HEIDI CHUNG Hey, Alexis, yeah. So Disney+ officially launching in seven European countries today. We have the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Switzerland.

Now, Disney+ was also supposed to launch in France. But that launch has been delayed until April 7th. Disney will also-- I just want to point out-- be temporarily cutting its bandwidth usage by 25%.

Earlier this week and late last week, we heard some other companies were doing the same to sort of limit the online traffic that we had been seeing. And those companies were Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Apple. But like you mentioned, we have heard of some early reports that folks over in Britain were struggling to be able to sign up for Disney+, experiencing some glitches there.

But I think the main question going forward is-- it was such a huge successful launch here in the US. But when we take a look at the timing and the situation and environment that we are in right now, this could either be extremely good for the Disney+ launch, or it could prove to be a pretty bad time for the company.

So I think going forward, we're going to be paying very close attention to the actual numbers that the company provides. But also, it'll be critical for this company to make sure that a lot of these countries aren't experiencing these glitches, so people can sign up successfully.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Brian Sozzi, what are your thoughts? Is a good time for Disney to be rolling this out? Should they have perhaps waited?

BRIAN SOZZI: I can't think of a better time, Alexis. Everybody's at home. Why not try to get people engaged with Disney+? Very key initiative-- [INAUDIBLE] now former CEO of Disney, Bob Iger.

I just want to call attention to-- we're seeing another big day in Roku shares, up double digits yesterday, up close to 10% this morning, definitely a t-- [AUDIO OUT] on Yahoo Finance.

Again, Roku shares had not been playing at the stay at home trade at least for the past two sessions. They're finally starting to catch catch a little wind.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Yeah, I want to take a look at Netflix right now, here on my Yahoo Finance screen. Netflix is actually down just slightly. But, you know, it has rallied big time throughout this crisis, as more and more people turn to Netflix.