Multichannel News

But with Fire TV and Roku somewhat bilaterally controlling 70% of the U.S. OTT player market, according to a Parks Associates report released in July, omission on the latter would seem counterintuitive to the aggressive growth predictions being made for Disney+.

From the article "Disney+ Still Lacks an Amazon Fire TV App a Week Away from Launch" by Daniel Frankel.

"Traditional pay TV providers (MVPDs) have faced continued subscriber losses due to increasing consumer choice from OTT services, so they are deploying skinny bundles and vMVPD services to create more choice among viewers," said Elizabeth Parks, president of Parks Associates. "For pay TV service providers, traditional and online, they are exploring new areas in content ownership and development, and to be successful in these efforts, understanding consumer activity and motivatio ...read more

According to Parks Associates, over a quarter of millennials subscribe to three or more over-the-top video services, and more than half use at least two. However, a separate U.S. survey from Vanson Bourne claims that 68% of all viewers still aren’t satisfied with the range of content currently available to them, even though they are paying an average of $86 per month (not including the cost of broadband) for access. 

From the article "Managing for the Optimized Content Bundl ...read more

The popular “subscription fatigue” narrative is that consumers have topped out on the number of over-the-top services they’re willing to pay for and are now in pruning mode.

But Parks Associates—which was one of the first research outfits to put the notion of subscription fatigue into the lexicon—now says that the number of OTT services in the average home is still expanding, and it’s traditional pay TV that’s getting the pruning.

According to some of the latest Parks re ...read more

It’s perhaps the most affordable living room OTT solution on the market. But as the Parks Associates graphic released in late May shows, Chromecast has been steadily losing market share to Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV. 

From the article "Google Makes First Major Chromecast Update Since 2015" by Daniel Frankel.

At last check, Twitch is home to more than a dozen 24/7 “channels,” including ones run and programmed by Fail Army, The Pet Collective, Shout TV, Baeble, Machinima, IGN, Red Bull TV, Arcade Cloud and Choppertown. Recent additions include Cheddar, the tech and business news service focused on affluent millennials, and Eleven Prime, a new offering from Eleven Sports that features an array of live sporting events, including basketball, baseball and football, as well as darts, drone ...read more

Parks Associates senior director of research Brett Sappington noted that most users of SVOD services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are younger (aged 25-34) and have been in their homes less than 12 months, adding that people who have SVOD subscriptions also have some form of pay TV service.

Sappington said the fastest segment among video consumers are households that are taking two, three and four services, so they aren’t averse to paying for content, they just don’t want to ...read more

Hub said this year marked the first time since it began tracking viewing patterns in 2014 that viewers are "more likely to say they watch a recently discovered favorite show from an online source than through their pay TV set-top box."

The report reinforces last week's Parks Associates study that found viewers favor subscription video-on-demand services over virtual MVPD services.

From the article "Hub Research Finds an OTT Tipping Point" by Gary Arlen.