Disney Plus Adds Continue Watching Feature That Was Removed After Launch

Publish date: 2024-09-20

Disney Plus now lets you pick up where you left off watching a TV show or movie — a table-stakes feature for any streaming service that Disney had removed shortly after Disney Plus’ debut two weeks ago as it worked to fix glitches.

The feature is now available on Disney Plus after the “Continue Watching” feature began rolling out Tuesday, as spotted by 9to5Google and CNET.

In the Disney Plus interface, “Continue Watching” appears as a new row on the main screen, displaying the most recently viewed selections. On individual show and movie pages, if users have previously paused viewing, a “resume” button lets them restart the film or episode at the point where they last stopped watching.

The update doesn’t require a new app download, as the streaming service is implementing the feature on the server side. As you would expect, “Continue Watching” works across platforms — so, for example, if you pause “The Mandalorian” on your connected TV device, you are able to resume playback on a mobile phone.

Kevin Mayer, chairman of Disney’s Direct-to-Consumer and International division, said last week at the Code Media conference that developers had temporarily disabled Continue Watching and other features while engineers fixed the Disney Plus app. Mayer acknowledged that the snafus for Disney Plus out of the gate “had we to do with the way we architected the app.”

The problems prevented many users from logging in and caused a flood of support inquiries to Disney Plus’ customer service that resulted in long wait times. On launch day, some users had complained that they were unable to access certain Disney Plus features, including the Watch List and setting up profiles.

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