It won’t surprise anyone who pays even passing attention to the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) space that a whole lot of consumers continued to add the services to their cadre of viewing choices in 2016. Digital TV Research released new projections on Wednesday that North America will have 112 million SVOD subscribers by the end of this year for movie and TV services only and excluding the likes of sports and so on. That’s up 19 million over 2015 numbers.
The research firm further predicts the SVOD total will climb to 138 million by 2021. However, it should be noted that the company’s “North America SVOD Forecasts” only expects 117 million TV households by 2021, so the SVOD total will represent 104 percent of TV households. “It is important to stress that these SVOD figures are gross – some homes take more than one SVOD platform, especially in the United States,” Digital TV Research Principal Analyst Simon Murray explains.
The report indicates the average U.S. SVOD subscriber will pay for approximately 1.5 services. From the 127 million U.S. total in 2021, it projects that 43 million will be secondary SVOD subscriptions. In other words, the forecast is for 84 million primary SVOD users in the United States by 2021 or 71 percent of TV households.
Murray also points out that this prediction includes Amazon Video, which some other forecasts don’t use since Amazon Prime subs do not directly pay for Amazon Video. “However, to give as full a picture of the sector as possible, we calculate that 60 percent of Amazon Prime subscribers watch Amazon Video,” he says.
U.S. Amazon Video subs will grow from 30 million in 2015 to 49 million by 2021, according to the Digital TV Research model. With an expected launch of Amazon Video in Canada in 2017, the research firm expects the service will have 51 million subscribers in North America by 2021. The report also suggests Netflix will have 59 million paying SVOD subscribers in North America by 2021, up from 53 million at the end of 2016. The United States is projected to provide the bulk of Netflix subscriptions with 52 million of the 2021 total.