• by Wayne Friedman , April 4, 2022

Streaming services -- such as Roku, Amazon Prime Video and others that distribute premium OTT apps -- continue to see strong downloads of big OTT premium apps.

Parks Associates says the percentage of households subscribing directly from OTT providers’ websites declined to 29% from 41% between first-quarter 2020 and third-quarter 2021 -- with downloads rising from "OTT aggregators."

But long term, some of this might change. Parks Associates says: "Given the enhanced value of subscriber data, some content providers are seeking to re-establish control over their viewers — and the data about them — by not offering subscriptions via aggregators."

For example, it notes that last year, HBO and HBO Max were removed from Amazon Prime Video Channels in September.

Parks’ research also points to high levels of consumers switching services, and then re-subscribing to the same service later on, over a 12-month period ending in the third quarter of 2021. The rate here was 36% -- around 36 million of all OTT subscribers in the third quarter 2021.

Looking more narrowly at just "churn" -- the amount of subscribers canceling a service in a given period represented as a percentage of the overall subscriber base -- the rate was just under 50%, up from around 35% in the first quarter of 2019.

The survey came from 10,000 households via Dynata, with demographic quotas to reflect U.S. heads-of-household ages 18 years and older who have broadband Internet at home.

Quotas are based on U.S. census data and Pew data released each year on broadband use in the U.S.