One recent consumer study shows overall
use of premium streaming platforms has remained largely unchanged since the COVID-19 pandemic started in mid-March.
Resonate, a Reston, Virginia-based consumer research
company, found that 43% of consumers polled said their use of streaming platforms “stayed the same” for the week of July 22 through July 28.
Previous
weeks -- beginning March 22-29 and going backwards, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic -- registered 35.4%; 43.4%; 36.2%; 40.0%; and 51.0% for those results.
The 43%
percentage was much higher than the percentage of consumers who said they either increased or decreased streaming usage.
Those who increased their streaming usage --
characterized by a “small extent,” “moderate extent” or “large extent” -- registered levels of between 16.1% and 18.7% -- more or less the same levels since March
22.
The number of consumers who said they “decreased” streaming usage was much lower -- ranging from 1.2% to 3%
-- than those who cited that they "stayed the same" in streaming usage over a four-month period.
In terms of which streaming TV
services consumers are now using more, for the week of July 22 through 28, Netflix had a 39.7% number, followed by Amazon Prime Video with 27.3%; Hulu, 22.3%; Disney+, 18.2%; HBO, 7.8%; Showtime,
4.0%; Pluto, 3.9%; and others, 5.1%.
Resonate’s study was fielded between July 22 and July 28, 2020 to a total of nearly 5,000 respondents. It also fields
surveys of about 100,000 total U.S. adults every 6 to 8 weeks, providing more than 13,000 attributes to describe the U.S. online population.