Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

Hulu to launch non-stop customer service as it readies live TV

The increased spending on customer service comes as Hulu is about to go head-to-head with internet channels that offer live TV from AT&T's DirecTVNow and Dish Network Corp's Sling TV.

The services have had hiccups - like shows freezing, viewers getting error messages and system crashes. Their owners also have large customer service staffs already handling calls from their traditional pay TV customers, said Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates.

The stakes are high for Hulu, which has a customer defection rate of 50 percent, according to Parks Associates, a Dallas-based market research firm.

"Live TV is a challenge particularly for events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars which draw millions of subscribers all at the same time," Sappington said. "You are never sure what's going to break until you have a few million people watching at the same time."

From the article "Hulu to launch non-stop customer service as it readies live TV".

Previously In The News

Over-the-top viewing hours doubled in 2017

This isn’t the first indication of Roku’s dominance among video streaming devices — Parks Associates found that Roku was the most popular video streaming device in Q1 2017, commanding a 37% market sha...

Apple's HomePod Set to Barge Into Hot Speaker Market

"Apple is restricting Siri support for third-party applications, which may hamper growth of the product ecosystem and play as an advantage to competitors," said Dina Abdelrazik, a research analyst wit...

Are Smart TV Designs Taking Home Security for Granted?

Security has been a growing concern with the increased use of smart television and video streaming devices, observed Brett Sappington, director of research at Parks Associates. "For many years, the...

Smart Homes: The Power, the Pleasure and the Pain

Amazon's servers were down for a large part of the morning on the day the outage occurred, taking Alexa-powered devices out of commission. Incidents like this may occur more often as the popularity of...