Study: Paramount+ sees biggest gains amongst US SVoDs
December 15, 2022
According to the latest DASH study by The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), the household penetration levels of the major subscription streaming services held mostly flat YoY in the US, with the exception of Paramount+, which has jumped up to 17 per cent from 11 per cent.
Additionally, Disney (41 per cent up from 39 per cent) and HBO Max (29 per cent up from 27 per cent) have risen slightly, while the market leaders, Netflix (66 per cent down from 69 per cent) and Prime Video (56 per cent down from 58 per cent), have declined simultaneously. In addition, Netflix and Disney+ remain the most shared services among both friends (12 per cent and per cent respectively) and relatives (36 per cent and 33 per cent respectively).
Other findings from the report include:
- Consumers Are Not Very Loyal to TV Set Brands: TV brand loyalty (or lack thereof) creates another measurement challenge. Many of the new currencies use Vizio data but projecting household viewing based on usage of Vizio smart TVs will not produce a complete picture as 86 per cent of households with one Vizio TV have other TVs from other brands. Even in households with two Vizio TVs, other brands of TVs are present in 70 per cent of cases. To make matters worse, not all the TVs in a smart TV household are smart.
- The Electronic Hearth Glows Less Brightly: In a simpler time, families watched television together during primetime. Now, primetime co-viewing is actually higher in two person households than in larger families with kids watching their devices in their own spaces.
- More than 5 per cent of US households do not have a television set, but it’s not because most of them are off the grid. Far from it: 80 per cent of these households have broadband, and more than 50 per cent watch on their devices. This is driven by young adults (18-34) in one person households, who are twice as likely as older viewers not to own a television. Reception mode follows suit: 50 per cent of TV set-less households are digital only (streaming), as opposed to just 14 per cent of households with TV sets.
- Broadband Only Penetration Continues to Grow: DASH data shows that Broadband Only (BBO) grew from 25 per cent in Summer 2021 to 30 per cent in Spring 2022 among TV accessible households, including those without a TV set. The corresponding BBO penetration figures in TV (set) households were 22 per cent and 26 per cent. Over the same period, pay-TV households declined from 61 per cent to 57 per cent.
- Virtual MVPDs Are Filling the Pay-TV Gap: BBO households can get linear television through virtual MVPDs (vMVPDs), like YouTube TV and Hulu+Live, so many in the industry want the rating services to treat vMVPDs as just another form of pay-TV (like cable, satellite and fibre services). DASH data shows that adding vMVPDs would raise the pay universe to 67 per cent and lower BBO to 20 per cent among all TV accessible households. Some in the industry represent this 20 per cent to be the entire BBO universe, while others include households with vMVPDs in BBO.
- TV Sets Are Increasingly “Unequal Access”: Only 21 per cent of pay-TV households have a set top box on every TV. The rest have at least one TV that accesses a different programming menu. For example, a third of pay-TV households have broadband connected to at least one TV, and 5 per cent have an antenna on at least one set. Almost half of the pay-TV households with broadband (14 per cent of 33 per cent) have YouTube TV on at least one television, which gives those households access to two modes of linear viewing.