The sheer number of streaming video on demand (SVOD) services available in 2019 is a bit overwhelming. While the landscape is still dominated by familiar giants like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, it seems as though a new player is entering the game every week; and consumers are starting to notice.
A recent Deloitte survey found that there were an estimated 200 OTT video services available in the United States during 2017. Now, there are more than 300 of those same services available, with more on the way—we’re not talking about small new services either. Apple is expected to announce their streaming service any day now, Disney has confirmed that their service will be launching soon and WarnerMedia is on track for a 2020 release.
This increasingly disparate market of SVOD services is causing many consumers to become fatigued with the number of subscriptions needed to watch the content they want. According to this Deloitte survey, 47% of U.S. customers say that they are frustrated by the number subscriptions and services required to watch certain content.
Want to see the new Star Trek? You’re gonna need a CBS subscription for that. Star Wars? You’re going to need the Disney service for that one. There really is no all-encompassing subscription service available right now. That means that there is a real opportunity for a service to come in and aggregate all this disparate content. According to Hub Entertainment Research 69% of consumers would prefer to get all of their content from a single source.
As a result, a lot of Americans find themselves subscribing to multiple services in an attempt to piece together a package of services that offers the content that they want. According to Deloitte, the average U.S. consumer currently subscribes to at least three SVOD services. However, as more services are created and more content becomes gated to specific services, more consumers will grow frustrated as they try to find the content that they want.
According to this survey, 49% of respondents said that the volume of content available across services make it really difficult to choose what to watch. Another 48% said that the amount of services often makes it difficult to find the content that they are looking for.
The reality is that SVOD services are not going anywhere anytime soon, what consumers need is an efficient way to aggregate all of those services and alleviate the friction that comes with having to subscribe to multiple platforms. Currently, Amazon and Roku offer the best ways to aggregate different content sources, but it is not unreasonable to expect more solutions to hit the market in the near future.
Sources:
https://www.businessinsider.com/growing-svod-fragmentation-causing-subscription-fatigue-2019-3
