About 31 percent of U.S. broadband households have multiple OTT service subscriptions, which is nearly one half of the 63 percent of U.S. broadband households subscribing to at least one OTT service, according to newly released Parks Associates research.
The findings are an interesting tie-in with projections revealed by Digital TV Research last month that North America will have 112 million subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) subscribers by the end of this year for movie and TV services only. Digital TV Research forecasted that the SVOD total will climb to 138 million by 2021. The firm also pointed out it only projects 117 million TV households by 2021, so the SVOD total would 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.
Parks Associates Senior Director of Research Brett Sappington reports that it used its “OTT Video Market Tracker” to identify this “service-stacking” trend, and underlines it as a core element of potential future growth for OTT. The research says the most common service stack is a Netflix and Amazon Video pairing among 12 percent of all U.S. broadband households.
“There are service stackers willing to experiment with different OTT combinations as new services arise,” Sappington says. “The regular release of high-quality original content, such as ‘The Grand Tour’ (Amazon) and ‘Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life’ (Netflix) ensures the large OTT players will remain a core, consistent subscription among service-stacking households.”
Parks Associates points out that Amazon is working to tie its online services to its expanding ecosystem of connected home products, including Echo with its voice-controlled virtual personal assistant (VPA), Alexa. That seems like a smart move given the fact that Echo and Echo Dot were the best-selling products across Amazon this year.
Parks Associates will present its connected entertainment research at the Connections Summit: IoT and the Smart Home at CES 2017 in Las Vegas on Jan. 5. More info is here.
