Children’s content drives streaming in Latin America

According to BB Data’s findings, children’s content on both Disney+ and Netflix is ​​very popular in Latin America.

The Florida-based research firm released a report titled Is children’s content a key subscription driver? on Dec. 4 with a breakdown of survey data collected throughout the year.

It shows that children’s programming motivated regional subscriptions for both platforms. Netflix (47%) and Disney+ (48%) have reached a similar share of households with children – but programming for this audience is a bigger deal for the Mouse House, with 90% of Disney+ members saying they like content aimed at children watch, compared to 70% Netflix users. (BB Data says this is consistent with Disney’s more child-friendly brand position and its higher-volume children’s library.)

Across both platforms, respondents cited animation, adventure and family as the genres they watch most often. A third of Disney+ subscribers (33%) say they watch the platform’s children’s catalog daily, and more or less the same number of Netflix subscribers do the same (30%).

Pixar dominated the most popular Disney+ children’s content in Latin America in the third quarter, with both “Inside Out” films and those from last year Elementary (pictured) fills the first three places. Meanwhile, Netflix users in the region gravitated towards older acquisitions such as Sing 2 (2021), How to train your dragon 2 (2014) and The Boss Baby (2017) during the same period.

When respondents were asked to rate the functionality of both platforms’ children’s profiles on a scale of one to five, Netflix won with higher scores for audio/subtitles (4.5), playback quality (4.5), profile navigation (4.4) and Personalization Recommendations (4.3) – compared to 3.7 and 3.8 for Disney+ in the same categories.

“This aspect could be crucial to how each platform strengthens the loyalty of family-oriented subscribers,” the report says. “To retain family audiences, both platforms must continually adapt to meet the needs of this important user base.”

Another recent data report estimates that Netflix is ​​expected to reach more than 54 million subscriptions in Latin America by 2030, which is expected to be a market leader over Disney+, which is expected to reach 22 million (Statista, March 2024).