Reports: Video subscriptions

The D2C big bang moment of 2019/2020 opened up a new offensive front for media majors as they competed with the communications and tech majors for streaming audience market share, which was previously lost to the SVOD insurgents. Pureplay media players responded via defensive consolidation and / or selling themselves to more motivated competitors.

This slide deck presents consumer demand for video subscription services and streaming consumption, with detail for streaming services and video consumption preferences. The data in this deck is pulled from MIDiA’s Q2 2021 Consumer Survey that was fielded in US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, South Korea and Brazil.

This report presents MIDiA’s Q2 2020 media consumption data, exploring time and money spent by consumers during the quarter. As such, it presents a snapshot of consumer behaviour that reflects both the impact of longer-term shifts and the shorter-term COVID-19 effect for the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France and Germany.

2018–2025 will represent an epoch-defining era for video as streaming supplants analogue as the main technology for delivering content to TV audiences. In 2018 streaming video subscriptions already reached parity with pay-TV subscriptions in leading markets.

Netflix is the poster child of Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) services with a rollout in 2016 to 130 territories worldwide and international subscribers accounting for 45% of users. A 2016 $1 billion bond issuance to fund increased content spend to $6 billion for 2017 underlines both the ambition and the resources being deployed by the company in its bid to grow into a mainstream international video provider.

Ever since the advent of Napster, media industries have been locked in a war against free. Learning from the lessons of the music business, TV companies nipped much of the P2P demand for shows by fighting free with free itself, launching services such as Hulu and BBC iPlayer.

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.