The over-the-top devil is in the details.
While OTT services are rapidly rising in use, so is consumers’ savvy in piggybacking onto their friends’ and family’s OTT subscriptions.
More than 57% of all broadband homes use over the-top video subscription services, but the sharing of such services is also on the rise, to the tune of 11% of homes exclusively using a buddy’s
account for OTT viewing, said Parks Associates in just-released research.
When it comes to sharing,
picture the college graduate who accesses HBO Go by logging in with his parent’s account, and so on. This reliance on someone else’s log-in represents lost revenue for content providers.
More than one-third of SVOD content consumed each week is via over-the top, but it only accounts for 9% of the household video expenditure, Parks Associates said in its report.
In younger
households, the practice is even more common, and 22% of consumers 18 to 24 who watch OTT are using someone else’s subscription.
Here is how the sharing breaks down by OTT service: about
11% of Netflix subscribers, 10% of Hulu Plus subscribers, and 5% of Amazon Prime Instant Video subscribers use an account that someone else pays for, Parks said. Bear in mind that most OTT services
allow some simultaneous streaming, but usually within the same household.
Consumer Reportssaid in January that 46% of subscribers share their account log-in with those outside of the
home.
The jury is still out on whether account sharing will pose a significant problem to OTT revenue. However, by all accounts SVOD will continue to grow. Juniper Research said that the number
of subscribers to OTT services like Netflix and Amazon will rise globally, from 92.1 million in 2014 to more than 332 million by 2019.