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It’s been a busy time in the OTT market with players coming and going and the choices available to customers growing more complicated and confusing. Here are some of the bigger recent events in the industry.
Continued Cord Cutting. The major cable providers lost 946,000 cable customers in the second quarter – the worst quarterly loss ever. This puts cord cutting at an annual loss rate of 2.7% of customer, up from only 1% a year ago. It’s obvious that cord cutting is picking up momentum, and the wide variety of OTT viewing has to be a contributor. Nielsen recently reported that 62% of homes now watch OTT content at least occasionally.
It’s getting harder for analysts to count cable customers. For example, Dish Networks is not reporting on the specific performance of its satellite service versus SlingTV. The losses for the quarter were also eased a bit by the fact that Charter began counting seasonal customers even when they go dormant, such as the snowbird in Florida who subscribe only in the winter but who keep the account active.
ESPN / Disney OTT Offering. Disney announced that it would be launching two new OTT offerings in 2019 – a standalone ESPN offering and a standalone Disney offering. Along with this announcement they announced they will be withdrawing Disney content from Netflix. The ESPN offering will not duplicate the cable version of the network and will not include things like the NFL and NBA. But it will include major league baseball, the NHL, major league soccer, grand slam tennis events and college sports. Analysts think this offering is mandatory since ESPN has lost 13 million subscribers since 2011 and advertising revenues dropped 8% last quarter.
The standalone Disney offering is also interesting in that the company has decided to take Netflix on head-to-head. Because of contractual arrangements Netflix will still have access to content produced by Disney such as the numerous shows produced by Disney’s Marvel Studios. But starting in 2019 Disney is going to make new content only available on their own platform. This prompted Netflix to purchase Millarworld, a major comics producer.
NBC Closing Seeso. NBCUniversal says that it will be ending the Seeso OTT offering later this year. This is an offering that consisted largely of NBC comedy and related entertainment such as Saturday Night Live and the Tonight with Jimmy Fallon.
This failure is a big warning to the many cable networks that have been contemplating using the strategy of shoving existing content online. Industry analysts say that simply taking linear content online is not a recipe for success. It seems that the platform is just as important as the concept and the bigger platforms like Netflix keep customers engaged and enabling them to move from show to show without leaving the platform. But it’s too easy for a customer to leave a limited-offering platform, thus diminishing the perceived value for customers to buy a subscription.
Facebook OTT Offering. Facebook has announced the launch of Watch, an OTT service that will include content from A&E, Univision, Major League Baseball and other content such as worldwide soccer. For now the new service is being launched overseas with some limited US trials, but is expected to hit the whole US market later this year.
The offering is being structured like YouTube to enable content creators to launch their own channels. Facebook is currently funding some content providers to seed content on the new service. They are hoping that within time the platform becomes self-sustaining and can be an alternative to the wildly popular YouTube. Facebook is counting on their ability to lure enough of their billion plus users to the new platform to make it a success. The company’s goal is to keep people on their platform for more than just social networking.
Apple. Apple will be entering the OTT world and announced that they will spend $1 billion to create programming content over the next year. This puts them into rarified company with Netflix that is spending $6 billion, Amazon at $4.5 billion and HBO at $2 billion. There is no news yet of the nature or timing of an Apple OTT offering.