OTT Video Market Tracker reveals churn rates for OTT video services and companies including Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu

Parks Associates announced today that the churn rate for OTT video services is 19% of U.S. broadband households, indicating roughly one in five households have cancelled an OTT service in the past 12 months. The company’s OTT Video Market Tracker service notes the overall churn rate for OTT services has been stable for the past year, with top services Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu all reducing their churn rates. At the end of 2015, 20% of U.S. broadband households had cancelled at least one OTT video service in the past 12 months.

“The churn rate has held steady, with one-in-five broadband households canceling an OTT video service in the past year,” said Brett Sappington, Senior Director of Research, Parks Associates. “These are not free trials but instances where consumers are spending real money to try out new OTT services. One-third of households that currently subscribe to an OTT video service have cancelled one or more services in the past year, which shows that there is quite a bit of experimentation occurring right now.”

OTT Video Market Tracker finds that households with OTT video subscriptions increased their spending from an average of $3.71 per month in 2012 to $7.95 in 2016. At the same time, spending on physical media purchases and rentals declined from an average of $15 per month to $8 per month and spending on digital transactional video declined from an average of $2.42 per month to $1.42 per month.

“On average, spending on subscription OTT video services now accounts for 85% of all household spending on Internet video,” said Glenn Hower, Senior Analyst, Parks Associates. “The key to success in the long term will be retention. Consumers are experimenting with different OTT services, and many providers incorporate no-contract, cancel-anytime models to remove barriers to entry and to entice consumers to try new services free of obligations.”

Parks Associates notes that churn is lowest among the top three most established services (Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu), and these providers are in a race to add new content and services or to match each other in new features to prevent any migration of their subscribers to a competitor. For example, Hulu recently announced it would offer its users the ability to download videos to watch offline, such as during a flight. Amazon began the trend for downloadable content in July 2016, and Netflix followed suit in November.

“These services have worked to establish core customer bases, and the inertia of these core groups provides an important baseline of ongoing revenues,” Sappington said. “They continue to refine or add to their offerings so that subscribers will continue to see new value in the service, providing ongoing reasons to remain a subscriber.”

Parks Associates’ OTT Video Market Tracker provides industry research data and analysis of competing players’ strengths and weaknesses in the space. The service includes an exhaustive analysis of market trends and profiles of the nearly 100 OTT video service providers in the U.S. and Canada, such as Netflix, HBO, YouTube, and Amazon, with updated deliverables throughout the year.

Parks Associates will address the OTT market during multiple sessions at the 21st-annual CONNECTIONS™: The Premier Connected Home Conference, May 23-25, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport. Executives from Comcast, Cox Communications, Intel, and Vivint Smart Home will deliver keynotes, and sessions will feature consumer research and market strategies for the consumer IoT, including the smart home, entertainment and CE, tech support, and mobile and digital content ecosystems.

For more information about the OTT Video Market Tracker, contact sales@parksassociates.com. To schedule an interview with an analyst, please contact HollySprague at hsprague@gmail.com. 

About Parks Associates

Parks Associates, a woman-founded and certified business, is an internationally recognized market research and consulting company specializing in emerging consumer technology products and services. Founded in 1986, Parks Associates provides business intelligence and research services through its proprietary methodologies developed over decades, including quarterly surveys of 10,000 internet households.

The company's expertise crosses many industries: home security and smart home, streaming video, broadband and pay-TV services, digital media and platforms, gaming, Wi-Fi and home networks, connected health, support, consumer electronics, home control systems, energy management, and tech solutions for the multi-dwelling (MDU), small-to-medium business (SMB), and commercial building markets.

Each year, Parks Associates brings thousands of leaders together for its webinars and annual events. The firm hosts the annual executive research and strategy conferences CONNECTIONS™, Connected Health Summit, Smart Energy Summit, Smart Spaces, and Future of Video. https://www.parksassociates.com

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