Consumer insights tracker J.D. Power has released its annual study which measures satisfaction scores amongst customers of live TV providers. This year, the company has included a brand new facet in its study: satisfaction scores amongst live TV streaming customers.
The study measures overall satisfaction with television service providers based on seven factors: performance and reliability; cost of service; programming; communications and promotions; billing and payment; features and functionality; and customer care.
As the data shows, the winner of the first-ever J.D. Power Live Streaming TV Study award is fuboTV, which just edged out Sling TV with a customer satisfaction score of 789 points out of 1,000. Satisfaction with streaming overall was also higher than cable and satellite, with overall satisfaction at 699 for cable and satellite, while streaming averaged out at 774.
“Operating the needed networks and equipment for cable and satellite TV from start to finish versus streamers who can use those networks for middle and last-mile delivery for hundreds of thousands of concurrent streams, are vastly different at a product level regarding cost,” J.D. Power managing director Ian Greenblatt said. “Live TV streamers (and their customers) are therefore the beneficiaries of the imbalance and can be seen as providing more value for the subscription dollars spent.”
The win represents a large feather in the cap of fuboTV. J.D. Power’s consumer satisfaction awards are highly respected in every industry, and J.D. Power has been delivering incisive industry intelligence on customer interactions with brands and products for more than 50 years.
Fubo CEO David Gandler was asked earlier this summer what he thought set his live TV service apart from those of competitors like Hulu Live TV or YouTube TV. Gandler pointed to his streamer’s focus on live sports offerings and emphasized the clout generated by the Fubo brand.
“You’ll see that quite often on big sporting event days, the number of downloads we get far exceeds what any of the other aggregators in the space will get,” Gandler said. “And so I think on the brand side, we probably have more equity there from a differentiation perspective.”
Add in a promise from Fubo executives not to tinker with the price of the service for no good reason, and the future of fuboTV is looking more stable than it did just a few months ago. Fubo dropped under 1 million subscribers during the second quarter of 2022, but having hardware like the J.D. Power Live Streaming TV Study award could certainly help lure more eyes to the service.
Fubo
Fubo is a live TV streaming service with about 90 top channels that start at $79.99 per month. This plan includes local channels, 25 of the top 35 cable channels, and regional sports networks (RSNs). In total, you should expect to pay about $91.99 per month, after adding in their RSN Fee. Fubo was previously known as “fuboTV.”