• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, February 9, 2017

Believe that growing OTT trends are here to stay. And for traditional media companies, this means OTT as an ongoing topic media business conversation -- especially during earnings phone call with analysts.

On Wednesday, during its earning call, Jeff Bewkes, chairman/CEO of Time Warner, said HBO Now has hit 2 million subscribers -- double the 1 million mark set last March. This comes on top of news that Time Warner’s Turner programming has added 2 million subscribers from a slew of OTT services.

Other traditional media companies are touting a similar direction: For CBS, CBS All Access and Showtime each have more than 1 million subscribers for their respective OTT efforts.

On Tuesday, for its financial quarter release, Bob Iger chairman/CEO of Walt Disney, said the company’s big cable network ESPN has been doing a wide-range number of OTT deals.

We don’t have a total OTT subscriber count here. But we can be assured this key business metric will be coming, all to bolster Disney’s business partners, as well as buy-side analysts.

Traditional media needs to keep the positive news coming. That's not just with praise about premium TV content that everyone wants -- but with news in making deals with newfangled OTT platforms many believe will reach restless TV-media consumers.

Legacy TV-media companies will continue to keep on eye on this data, as well as ever-bigger, now established OTT competitors: Netflix (48 million subscribers); Amazon (21.6 million); and Hulu (12 million).

What platform will win out? That’s not the most important question. Think more about the overall business.

One recent Parks Associate survey says “churn”  rates -- the measure of monthly subscriber cancellation of a OTT service -- has been stable over the last 12 months. This respresents 19% of U.S. broadband households.

This should not trigger fear in individual-minded TV networks that have their own OTT. Traditionalists of TV programming deals understand the whole  ‘cancellation’ thing -- all part of the business, just another chance to offer something new.