Following are a few topics that I find interesting, but which are too short to cover in a full blog:
Surge in Online Video Subscriptions. The number of households buying online video is surging. Netflix added almost 2 million US and 6.36 million international customers in the 4th quarter of 2017. That’s 18% more than the same quarter from a year earlier. There are also a growing number of vMVPD customers. At the end of last year CBS All Access has nearly 5 million customers. Showtime OTT also has nearly 5 million customers. Sling TV now has nearly 2 million customers. AT&T DirecTV hit the 1 million customer mark in December. PlayStation Vue reported 670,000 customers in mid-December. The new YouTube service has about 300,000. Hulu is also growing but doesn’t separately report it’s live TV customers from it’s video on demand customers (reported at 17 million total in December). Note that Hulu let’s customers buy one TV series or movies without needed a subscription.
Cellphone Data Usage Growth. According to the research firm NPD the average US smartphone now is used for an average of 31.4 GB per month of data. This is combined usage between cellular and WiFi data and is evidence that people are starting to really accept the small screen for video. This is up over 25% from a year earlier. The firm reports that video accounts for 83% of the usage.
The number of people willing to use a cellphone for video has also surged. NPD reports that 67% of cellphone users watched at least one video during the 3rd quarter of 2017, up from 57% in the 2nd quarter. Another research firm, Strategic Analytics reported that worldwide cellular data usage grew 115% in 2017, or more than doubled.
Global Streaming Doubled in 2017. Conviva, which provides systems to monitor and analyze online usage also reports that online video content more than doubled last year. They report that there were 12.6 billion viewing hours of online video in 2017 measured across 2.4 billon viewing devices. They report that 58% of video viewing came from North America; 21% from Europe; 19% from Asia 2% from the rest of the world.
Satellite TV Taking the Brunt of Cord Cutting. For some reason cord cutting seemed to be hitting the two big satellite TV providers even harder than landline cable companies. Dish Networks and DirecTV together lost 4.7% of their subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2017. We can only speculate for the reasons for the shift. The bundles of the landline cable companies make it harder for customers to drop their cable subscription. But to offset this, many satellite customers are in rural areas where there is often not a good broadband alternative to cable. But perhaps the FCC’s CAF II and ACAM programs are speeding up rural broadband enough for households to consider cutting the cord. It should be noted that AT&T is pushing their DirecTV now product more than their satellite TV, which also might account for part of the shift from satellite TV.
Apple Jumps into Programming. Apple quietly has gotten into the programing business. They’ve allocated over $1 billion in 2018 for the creation of new content. They’ve landed some big-name talent such as Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon for projects. Apple doesn’t have a content platform and the industry is buzzing with speculation on how they might market and distribute the content.
Pirated Video Content on Rise. Sandvine reports that 6.5% of North American households have accessed pirated video content in the last year. I’ve read reports from Canada of companies openly advertising pirated content, including providing settop boxes that can download IPTV content directly from the Internet. Yesterday’s blog talked about new efforts by content owners to force ISPs to enforce copyright infringement.