Disney+ Bets Big on AWS to Outcompete Netflix
The Walt Disney Company’s hopes for Disney+ to unseat Netflix hinge on two specific issues: premium content and global reach.
Disney+ may hold the advantage in content with Star Wars and Marvel Studio, Netflix holds the edge in global reach. And the Walt Disney Company is now looking to leverage AWS to compete with Netflix in this area.
A recent announcement noted that The Walt Disney Company is leveraging AWS for the global rollout of Disney+. It will leverage AWS’s fault-tolerant, highly performant infrastructure to rapidly expand Disney+ to 59 countries across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.
The announcement builds on the previous collaboration between both companies. AWS’s cloud video infrastructure helped Disney+ handle more than 10 million new sign-ups within 24 hours of its November 12, 2019 launch.
With this announcement, Disney+ will continue to use AWS’s services and its more than 50 technologies, such as machine learning, database, storage, content delivery, serverless, and analytics.
For example, Disney+ uses Amazon Kinesis to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data. Amazon DynamoDB drives extreme performance at different scales with built-in encryption and data recovery to ingest content, metadata, and billions of customer actions each day. It allows viewers to add content to their Watch Lists, start watching a video, pick it up on a different device, and make recommendations.
Amazon Timestream, AWS’s serverless, time-series database built for large-scale ingestion, storage, and real-time querying of time-series data, helps Disney+ monitor the streaming platform's efficacy to maintain the quality of video content.
“Disney+ has completely reinvented what’s possible in content delivery by challenging convention and using cloud technology to build a streaming product from scratch that had never been launched and marketed before on such a global scale,” claimed Joe Inzerillo, executive vice president and chief technology officer for direct-to-consumer at The Walt Disney Company.
“AWS has been our preferred cloud provider for years, and its proven global infrastructure and expansive suite of services has contributed meaningfully to the incredible success of Disney+,” he added.
Image credit: iStockphoto/David Peperkamp
