While things have been difficult for a lot of streaming services lately, they have apparently been pretty friendly for one live TV streaming service over the past three months. On Thursday, skinny bundle Frndly TV released subscriber information for the second quarter of 2022 and reported seeing a 58% increase in time spent on the service during that period compared to Q2 2021; April of this year saw a 62% year-over-year increase. Frndly also saw a 12% increase in hours per subscriber spent streaming as compared to the second quarter of 2021.
The streamer declined to provide specific subscriber or usage totals, but it appears that the company is continue to trend in a positive direction. This quarter’s growth comes on the heels of Q1 when the streamer saw a 63% increase in viewing time. Frndly last publicly disclosed its subscriber total in November 2021 when it announced that it would be adding the A&E Networks. At the time, the streamer reported having 500,000 customers.
However, it is believed that because of Frndly TV’s heart-warming, family content that subscriber totals increase late in the year, specifically due to consumers looking for a low-cost option to stream the Hallmark Channel’s holiday movies.
“As we continue to build on our past success, we have kept our focus on providing quality content, an outstanding customer experience, as well as creating significant value to advertisers who want to reach our highly engaged subscribers,” Frndly TV head of advertising Sales Steve Sklar said.
The streamer noted that the increase in engagement was in part attributable to added content options and upgrades to the user experience based specifically on requests and recommendations made by customers.
Since its launch, the service has been open about its goal of providing family-friendly content at a wallet-friendly price. Earlier this year, the company reported only 40 employees with the hopes of keeping operational costs as low as possible in order to pass those savings on to consumers. As evidenced by making specific changes based on customer recommendations, the streamer also feels that having direct interaction with subscribers is vital to its success.
“We just try to do a really good job of keeping our overhead and cost structure as low as we can so we can continue to add great content to our lineup,” Frndly co-founder Andy Karofsky said in March. “We also made a strategic decision at the beginning to keep the customer service in-house, so that we were directly in contact with our subscribers … It allows us to take it into consideration when we’re looking at programming or any other aspect of the business that touches the consumer.”
Frndly TV
Frndly TV is a live TV streaming service with over 40 channels for $7.99/month. Each plan is designed to provide a skinny bundle of family-friendly channels at a reasonable price. The service will appeal most to fans of Hallmark channels. It does not offer news, sports, or local channels.