SVOD reaches half of all US households


Details

Michelle Clancy

| 10 March 2016




At the end of February 2016 subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services were in more than half of US TV households, up from 43% in February 2015.



According to research from Pivotal Research Group, Netflix, unsurprisingly, is the most popular SVOD service, in 45% of US homes (up from 38% a year ago), followed by Amazon Prime in 21% of homes (up from 15%) and then Hulu in 10% of homes (up from 7%).

However, dovetailing with other research, Pivotal said that the additional SVOD penetration wasn’t leading to cord-cutting, with asserts that TV networks’ viewing is down ‘only modestly’. Some networks, including have actually experienced growth an increase in viewing in SVOD homes — more so than in non-SVOD homes. These include CBS (up 13.2%), Crown (up 7.2%), Time Warner (up 2.8%), AMC (up 1.7%) and Scripps (up 1.4%).

And those experiencing a decline included Disney (down 8.7%), NBCU (down 7.5%), Discovery (down 6.4%), Viacom (down 3.7%) and FOX (down 3%).

From October 2015 to February 2016, TV viewing in SVOD homes was down by only 1.5%, excluding viewing on connected devices.

Pivotal concluded that the biggest risk to the status quo from SVOD uptake is to affiliate fees, which are seen a vulnerable to skinny bundle adoption, while a content spending ‘arms race’ will pressure all TV networks’ profitability.