Reports: Apple TV

The big gap in streaming video’s content mix has historically been sports. This is now changing through a combination of disruptive challenger sports subscription video on demand (SVOD) services such as DAZN accelerating its rights and territory offerings alongside the increased interest being shown by the tech majors – notably Amazon and Facebook – in streaming premium sports offerings.

Streaming is rewriting the games market rulebook. The games subscription landscape is undergoing foundational changes driven by a growing list of new market entrants including tech majors, telcos, leading games developers and publishers. The rise of games streaming opens doors to device- and platform-agnostic solutions all across the attention economy, as companies look to capture the engagement of valuable gamer segments for their respective ecosystems and business objectives.

2019 marks the biggest shift in the US video market since Netflix’s pivot into streaming in 2007. Apple, Disney and AT&T-owned Warner Media are preparing for their direct-to-consumer (D2C) launches into the US market in Q3/Q4 2019. How they fare will have a significant impact on the global evolution of video subscriptions.

This is part of MIDiA’s data snapshot series in which we spotlight curated consumer datasets. Figure 1: The Digital Home is Becoming Increasingly Sophisticated Household Ownership of Digital Technology, Q1 2018 The ‘digital home’ was a term that rose to prominence in the mid 2000s as the first generation of home router centred devices started to come to market at scale.

SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand) is now the default mainstream video on demand consumption behaviour for TV-like content. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are now the twin lenses behind measuring overall SVOD engagement. Netflix and Amazon users over-index on all SVOD consumption metrics tracked and this underlines the importance of engaging with these segments.

The game console owner segment is evolving fast. Still relatively young for now, console game fans are both aging and heading towards truly mainstream demographic distribution. Simultaneously, console subscription models are gaining traction, migrating premium physical software budgets into digital spend.

Online TV viewing in the UK is now a mainstream consumer activity. This has been facilitated by near universal levels of internet connectivity and smartphone adoption and driven by the unique role played by national broadcaster the BBC. However while the UK is in the vanguard of video viewing, the dominant position of BBC’s iPlayer ad-free OTT (Over The Top) programming complicates the environment for SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand) services.

Content Connectors, devices such as Apple TV, Google’s Chromecast, Amazon Kindle Fire TV and Roku, are set to transform the way in which mainstream consumers interact with digital content. Current adopters of these devices are the most valuable paid content consumers across all content genres, not just the video for which Content Connectors are best known.