According to Parks Associates, 53% of U.S. broadband households subscribe to both a pay TV service and at least one OTT video service. The research house says more than 200 OTT video services are active in the U.S. market as of Q3 2017, with more than 100 active in the Canadian market. Parks says 60 players introduced OTT video services during 2016 and 2017, while only seven services closed during that same period.
"Many OTT services are evolving to be complementary to the market's largest players, instead of trying to compete directly against Netflix, Amazon and Hulu," said Brett Sappington, Parks' senior director of research. "Also, consumers are increasingly self-aggregating their OTT and entertainment services - they are adopting primary entertainment content sources and supplementing those sources with complementary video options."
"Several factors are driving an increase in partnerships with and among OTT video services, including fragmentation of content, the success of bundling, polarization in the OTT subscription market, a low threshold for OTT service survival, and low awareness of many OTT service brands," Sappington said.
Other findings indicate:
- More than 87% of OTT video services in the United States and 86% in Canada offer some type of subscription options today, including freemium, ad-free premium tiers, and other blended business models.
- Awareness and use of TV Everywhere features have slowly increased over the past few years, reaching 34% by late 2016.