We are SO proud of Paramount+ programmers for continuing to do a better job than most of their competitors at adding missing features to their service.
Paramount+ has a “status message” on all television series pages. We saw things like this a while back, but its presence on EVERY series page seems new. Either way, this warrants an article to show it off and hope that teams at other services see this and decide to copy their homework.
We’ll break it down in just a bit in case you can’t see what we’re referring to.
Disney+ actually has an area to do these “status messages,” but their team almost never does anything with it. Mostly, they use the space for an occasional “Coming to Disney+” message. Take a look below.
Ice Age: Scrat Tales
We’ve covered well their concerning habit of not using their features and not promoting well in-app. While Disney+ sorely needs to implement better in-app promo tactics, Paramount+ provides numerous status messages that are specific to the series current status.
Paramount does the best job we’ve ever seen (outside of Netflix) at keeping people informed on the status of series and dissemination of episodes through the title pages themselves. They have 6 or 7 unique messages.
Let’s BREAK IT DOWN.
First let’s look at two series title pages that are coming soon (or in the case of Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder, were at the time we took the photos).
Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder
“NEW SERIES MARCH 31.” Straight to the point. Disney’s upcoming series Sketchbook and Ms. Marvel could use pages with a message like this.
The Offer
“NEW LIMITED SERIES STREAMING APRIL 28.” This time they specify the type of series and include the word “streaming.” We’d prefer they use similar format for both variations. Either include the word “streaming” in both or neither.
What if the series has already joined the service and now it’s almost time for a new season? Paramount+ has you covered.
iCarly
“NEW EPISODES COMING APRIL 8.” Such a great thing to know, right? We prefer this so much over Disney+’s mind-numbing verbiage for everything “Coming to Disney+.” As people have often joked… no, really? You mean it’s not going to theatres or to Netflix? Last we checked, people on Disney+ already know they’re there. Keep the messages clean and simple like Paramount+ and Netflix do.
As stated earlier, we do wish they’d use the same format between their messages. Are new episodes “Coming” or “Streaming”? Consistency matters.
What about series that are already streaming on the service and not awaiting an upcoming season? They have a message for that too! All of their older / completed library series have this message below.
Nick Arcade
“NOW STREAMING.” Sure, why not. No harm in including the message so that all pages have one.
We told you they have a lot of specific messages, so they’ve also made one for series that are newer and just finished their episodes. Take the recently completed Yellowstone prequel, 1883.
1883
Instead of saying “NOW STREAMING” they say “ALL EPISODES NOW STREAMING.” This is extremely helpful to anyone who is waiting to binge a show after the season finale instead of watching it weekly. Disney+ would never provide this information. It’s always a guessing game of whether or not the series is coming back the next week!
There’s another variation for a newer series that Rugrats displays.
Rugrats
“NEW SERIES NOW STREAMING.” 10 more episodes have just been announced as coming April 15th, so hopefully they update that message soon.
Now let’s look at another scenario. An established show has started airing new episodes weekly. How can you help your subscribers understand this?
Picard
“NEW SEASON NOW STREAMING.” Okay, that makes sense. More specific than the old shows saying “Now Streaming.” Perhaps it would be better to include the day but this is so far beyond what Disney+ does we can’t hate.
On Disney’s uber-excellent new series, The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder there is NOTHING on the title page that even remotely suggests the show is actively airing episodes. That’s ridiculous. Here, take a look.
The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder
Fun fact: We, the biggest Disney+ critics, think the Disney+ title page UI here is better than Paramount+’s overall, but strongly believe it’s imperative they add a “Status message” above the “Continue” button. We’d also like to see Disney+ add a “thumbs up” icon next to the Watchlist and Trailer buttons. Yes, we’re advocating for a like / dislike feature.
We think Disney+ has a long way to go and a major problem is the poor decision to maintain 3 separate streaming services with different UIs and philosophies. When Disney decided to maintain 3, the intelligent decision would have been to share a user interface / aesthetic. Paramount Global, Warner Bros Discovery. and Comcast can focus their resources appropriately and make one nice service with a proper feature set and frequent iterations.
Disney Streaming lags behind all competitors, particularly with regards to properly promoting content in-app. We offer significant praise Paramount for adding this industry-leading feature.
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.
