Study: 63% of Customers Believe It’s Too Expensive to Subscribe to All Streaming Services
As the streaming industry begins to reorient itself following the foundational shifts that Netflix announced following its first subscriber decline in over a decade, information technology company Accenture unveiled research that indicates that while it might not be easy, “innovation in business models is the key to winning the biggest segments of the streaming video market.”
In their most recent report, Accenture projects that by 2025, the ad-funded video market — which includes ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) and free, ad-supported TV (FAST) services — will climb to $21 billion. That would mark a massive $20 billion increase since 2017. While the ad-funded market is unlikely to eclipse the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) market any time soon, Accenture notes that ad-funded video is likely to grow at a much faster rate than SVODs over the next five years.
According to the research, due to the rapid proliferation of streaming services, 63% of consumers believe that it is too expensive to pay for all of the subscriptions that they would like to have. With the paring down of SVOD happening fast than ever before in the streaming era, it is likely that the free and/or ad-supported options will see an increase in users. After HBO Max launched an ad-supported tier last year, Disney+ announced that they would be debuting a similar option later this fall, and last month, Netflix reversed a decade’s worth of public statements to confirm that they too were currently working on an ad-supported subscription level to hit the market in “a year or two.”
Despite the expansion of streamers on the market, Accenture’s study shows that 88% of consumers plan to either keep their current entertainment spending as is or decrease it in the coming year. Additionally, 73% of respondents indicated that they would not be willing to pay more in order to have ads removed from their favorite TV shows.
As more and more companies enter the streaming world, it appears clear that they must meet customers where they are by offering a variety of price points that will allow as much streaming adoption and engagement as possible.