Daily streaming per-service user engagement drops in 2022
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| 02 March 2023
In its latest study of the global streaming market, NPAW has found that although global streaming adoption continued growing overall in 2022, the myriad content options launched in the past two years mean that individual services on average captured a smaller share of users’ daily watching time.
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NPAW’s 2022 Video Streaming Industry Report, the fourth edition of its annual investigation of the streaming industry, examined the evolution of streaming consumption and quality of experience (QoE) trends on a global and regional scale. It compared 2022 data with findings from 2021 and 2020. All 2022 anonymised data insights featured in the analysis were extracted via the NPAW Suite of analytics from 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2022.

Metrics included average bitrate, average daily playtime per user and service and buffer ratio among others.The report noted that in 2022, for the second year in a row, providers around the globe saw a year-on-year increase in the total number of video plays while daily consumption per user and service continued to drop for both VOD, down 12% annually, and linear TV, which fell 23%.

Sports content emerged once more as a major driver of viewer interest, with the Qatar FIFA World Cup showing what live sports can contribute in terms of engagement. The football tournament provided a big boost in consumption, reaffirming the high engagement draw of sports content. Providers with streaming rights to the tournament enjoyed an increase of 80% in the total number of plays and 83% higher total playtime when compared with the previous six months.

The study found that the time each user spent watching VOD content on each service further decreased compared with 2021 by 12%, demonstrating increased fragmentation and viewer choice, while viewers watched fewer titles, 7% less. Daily linear TV playtime per user and service took a big hit, declining by 23% year-on-year while users watched 11% fewer titles per day.

However, global VOD quality stabilized, showing said NPAW the fruits of significant cross-industry technology upgrades made in previous years. The average bitrate for VOD marginally decreased by just 1%, suggesting the beginning of a plateau in VOD video quality. Providers, keen to enable the best possible streaming experiences, focused on minimising buffering by proactively increasing the average join time so that more of the program loads before the viewer can play. However, this resulted in higher exit before video start rates as users had more time, and greater opportunity, to disconnect before playback started.

Global linear TV quality kept getting better, demonstrating said NPAW how highly broadcasters and operators continue to prioritise linear TV QoE, and suggesting that this upward trend will continue. Here, average join time also increased, which, as above, suggests providers are implementing longer time lags to allow for higher-quality video to load in order to avoid mid-stream buffering.

“With competition growing fiercer by the minute, it’s business-critical for streaming services to provide the right content and a superior streaming experience if they want to attract and retain users and maintain growth," said Ferran G. Vilaró, CEO and co-founder of NPAW commenting the report. "To do so, they need to leverage their platforms' data to the fullest extent, implementing advanced analytics solutions that combine technical performance monitoring and user journey insights."