Frndly TV Going the extra mile for the silver dollar

Established by former pay-TV executives from DISH in 2019, Frndly TV’s founding mission was to serve the needs of pay-TV customers who were paying too much for too many under-viewed channels. While traditional pay TV was aware of this issue and indeed had started reluctantly rolling out “skinny bundles” in the US market, Frndly TV went one step further by introducing monthly subscriptions at a dramatically lower price point (40 channels at $6.99 per month). The timing was good. In Q4 2019, for the first time, MIDiA consumer data reported that the majority of 16+ US consumers now had monthly video subscriptions (51%, up from 45% in Q3 2019). However, the timing became even better as Q1 2020 ushered in stay-at-home mandates and unleashed an additional 12% of home entertainment time in the US market. This coincided with the D2C big bang moment of 2019-2021 where pay-TV operators and networks started heavily promoting subscription video on demand (SVOD) to mainstream pay-TV audiences. 

The silver streamer opportunity

Due to the constraints of the pricing model, Frndly TV focused heavily on securing content from services that catered to older audiences, such as the Hallmark Channel, Lifetime, The and History Channel, etc. The resulting first wave of subscribers was overwhelmingly 55+, the traditional cornerstone of pay TV (in Q1 2020, 37% of US pay-TV subscribers were 55+). For these customers , who were new to on-demand monthly subscriptions, Frndly TV realised that it had to invest in educating and supporting its new prospects into becoming Frndly TV subscribers. A dedicated phone support service ensured that the experience was as frictionless as possible for these consumers, and resulted in the service growing to 500,000 subscribers in May 2021, and further to 700,000 subscribers in December 2022.

From a business ROI perspective, Frndly TV is making the case that investing additional resources into customer acquisition and retention that is focused on older consumers will be repaid by reduced churn (55+s are half as likely to churn as the consumer average based on content availability) and more predictable revenue growth.