Ok, it’s lame, I know. But like thousands of other Malaysians who have been waiting for upwards of 2 years to finally legally access Disney+ content, when the Subscribe button finally got activated on the site, I jumped on as soon as I could.

I wasn’t expected to be wowed, honestly. We had a lot of time to scour the net and accept the sad truth that the experience for Malaysians wouldn’t be as great as what our neighbors in Singapore would get with the “real” Disney+ app. And so, as I found out within 30 minutes of signing up, it wasn’t.

First off, credit where it’s due: Disney+ Hotstar makes signing up via web browser pretty easy, which isn’t anything to shout about considering it is mid-2021 and the service had at least 5 other competing streaming services to learn from. I just had to give them my mobile number to activate the service, and supply it with my credit card details to fully enable the 3-month special “offer” of RM54.90.

Also, it’s quite cool that the default audio language is BM, I started the first episode of Falcon and The Winter Soldier and jumped up when the characters started talking. So yes, brownie points, and awesome for local providers of the translation and voice acting.

So as I was happily streaming through the Falcon’s murder spree in the first episode, it did occur to me that while I was watching on my laptop, wouldn’t it be great to catch Avengers Endgame at 4K on a big screen TV?

Why yes, it would be, but sadly, as the owner of a non-Android OS smart TV, it seems as of today anyway, that I am sorely out of luck. Neither do any of my gaming consoles support the Hotstar app, even though the Disney+ app is available for download from their respective app stores. I’d need a TV running a recent version of Android OS, or a separate Android TV Box, or an Apple TV box to really get the app running.

Since the kids are at home during “school holidays and MCO I suppose they would be the ones to enjoy it most. We’ll see if this is a viable streaming provider or if at the end of the three months promotion, I’ll discard this one too. As of this afternoon the kids are watching Soul on the home PC so I guess that’ll do….or will it?