M+E Connections

By Chris Tribbey, Editorial Director, MESA –

In early November, video game and entertainment site IGN did the math: anyone wanting to subscribe to every major streaming service out there (HBO Max, Disney+, CBS All Access, Apple TV+, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Starz and Showtime) better get ready to pony up just over $90 a month, or around the same amount you’d shell out for monthly cable.

While it will be the rare consumer indeed who subscribes to everything available, direct-to-consumer (D2C) companies are right to be optimistic, and traditional pay TV services are right to be concerned: an August study from research firm eMarketer found that the number of cord-cutting households has risen more than 19 percent in 2019, and the number of U.S. homes without a traditional pay TV service is, for the first time, almost on par with those without.

Rising programming costs have telco, cable and satellite operators struggling to turn a profit on subscriptions, and D2C endeavors are most certainly ready to take advantage: Disney+ expects anywhere between 60 million to 90 million subscribers by 2024, and HBO Max forecasts no less than 75 million by 2025.

Still, a late-October consumer survey from content tracking platform company TV Time offers a note of caution for streaming services: 70 percent of surveyed consumers say there are too many streaming services to choose from, and nearly 90 percent say they’re concerned about how expensive it will be to keep up with subscriptions.

The good news for streaming providers? That same study found 42 percent of consumers saying they would add a new service, with 20 percent saying they would add two. And 42 percent said they wouldn’t be adverse to ad-supported content with their subscription.

Still, it’s getting crowded out there, and if all these new players want to stick around long term, and not go the way of PlayStation Vue, there are some tactics they can take to avoid churn and stay relevant.

Be everywhere … and work with your competition: The week before its launch, Disney finally hammered out a deal with Amazon to bring the Disney+ app to Amazon Fire TV devices. It’s a smart move for both: Amazon doesn’t want Disney+ siphoning away Prime users, but it also doesn’t want Disney+ fans to abandon its streaming hardware. And Disney+ needs to be available absolutely everywhere it can be.

Apple wisely tore down its walled garden with the launch of Apple TV+, making the service available on not just its devices, but Roku, Fire TV, Samsung connected TVs, and TVs from LG and (soon) Vizio.

However, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 owners are out of luck, and that’s a mistake.

Protect your content: Tim Pearson, senior director of product marketing for content protection tech company NAGRA, sees it this way: “As we see services evolve and scale, the surface areas of a business which can come under threat of attack from a piracy or cybersecurity perspective are increasing.”

That means streaming services can’t just look at piracy as an endpoint, living room issue: the bigger the delivery chain, the more opportunities for content to be compromised on the way to the viewer. Know what threats exist at every point of the content’s journey, and work with vendors to not only prevent piracy, but quickly respond when it does happen. Additionally, by all means, crack down on password sharing.

Data, data, everywhere: Netflix has turned the data it collects from subscribers into meaningful recommendations, understanding patterns, predicting what people want to watch next. It’s done remarkably well at keeping subscribers on the platform.

Every streaming service should aim to provide the same data-driven personalization to its subscribers. It helps to avoid subscriber churn and keeps viewers on the service longer. And there are machine learning and artificial intelligence tools available today to make it simple to do.

There are plenty of streaming subscribers to go around. October data from DigitalTVResearch predicts global subscriptions to hit 970 million by 2024. Which services are still around then to grab those subscribers might depend on paying attention to things like the above.

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