UPDATE June 24: It’s now 54 out of 256 titles that are streaming on NatGeoTV. Disney has decided to increase the content available to cable customers instead of their flagship streaming service. Only 21% of the NatGeoTV.com library streams on Disney+, virtually unchanged in over 2 years.
On March 30th, Disney dropped over 90 National Geographic titles in one day onto the Canadian service. It got us thinking about the United States Nat Geo library… Just how much is still missing? Using the website where Disney posts the on-demand content for cable subscribers to stream, we went to the A to Z list and simply scrolled down. You can follow along via our tweet thread or read on.
What we discovered was horrifying. The content on this site only cover the years 2016 to 2022. There is no worthwhile way to view Nat Geo titles that are from earlier than 2015 unless Disney+ has added them. Disney+ has only added 20.58% of the content they have streaming on NatGeoTV.com.
This means that there is an enormous amount missing and if we consider the fact that this is only recent stuff it shows you just how shallow the library is overall. Anything having to do with war, the pandemic, September 11th, North Korea, racial issues, or violent animals can be assumed is unavailable on Disney+. This includes numerous Shark titles which skipped USA last SharkFest but went to Australia and UK. As one subscriber we spoke to today put it, Disney+ Nat Geo is basically just nature documentaries.
We’ve covered over and over again the problems with Disney’s library and their inability (or unwillingness) to use it.. But it’s time for them to start doing better and to give the service in America more value for adults, and really, everyone.
The National Geographic Society deserves better than for their educational content to be locked away on an antiquated distribution system. This is not where content should be in 2022. This Nat Geo TV website shouldn’t even exist in this form. It should be 50 titles, not 250. The content older than 2021 should be purged and stream on Disney+. The most recent season or a selection of 5-10 most recent episodes should be the extent of what they make available.
A lot of these titles are probably locked in to a contract that requires them to remain there exclusively until a certain period of time, but with the many 2018 titles coming up on 4 years of availability you’d think those deals would be ending soon… Sadly, still no.
Here is the full lineup with BLUE SQUARES around the titles available on Disney+. We’ll leave you with that. Happy browsing.
Blue Squares accurate as of April 2022. Some titles have since left and others have been added. Relatively unchanged, however.
Drew Ryan is a film, TV, and Disney geek. He has degrees in English, Student Personnel Administration, and Library & Information Science from Lawrence University, Concordia University-Wisconsin, and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Interested in the minutia and licensing of streaming service content, he is always publishing lists, suggestions, and advocating for Disney’s missing library to be added to Disney+. Drew subscribes to Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max, and Paramount+. You can find him waxing nostalgic over classic Disney Channel or geeking out over Marvel, CW shows, & Disney on Twitter.
