Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

Hulu to launch non-stop customer service as it readies live TV

The increased spending on customer service comes as Hulu is about to go head-to-head with internet channels that offer live TV from AT&T's DirecTVNow and Dish Network Corp's Sling TV.

The services have had hiccups - like shows freezing, viewers getting error messages and system crashes. Their owners also have large customer service staffs already handling calls from their traditional pay TV customers, said Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates.

The stakes are high for Hulu, which has a customer defection rate of 50 percent, according to Parks Associates, a Dallas-based market research firm.

"Live TV is a challenge particularly for events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars which draw millions of subscribers all at the same time," Sappington said. "You are never sure what's going to break until you have a few million people watching at the same time."

From the article "Hulu to launch non-stop customer service as it readies live TV".

Previously In The News

Epix Enters the Direct-to-Consumer Streaming Fray

Though Epix is trying to take advantage of this trend as a portion of consumers self-bundle with video, the challenge will be to ensure that Epix is part of that bundle. A recent study from Parks Asso...

Pirates Poised to Pluck More From Pay-TV, OTT

"Piracy is a complex issue that cannot be addressed with a single solution or by targeting a single use case," said Brett Sappington, senior research director and principal analyst at Parks Associates...

New Route to New Revenue: Detect & Respond to Credentials Sharing

Credentials sharing is not a new problem for service providers. As the OTT and pay-TV landscapes continue to evolve to accommodate entertainment on multiple devices, credentials sharing has followed s...

Mozilla Trumpets Altered Reality Browser

Virtual reality needs its own kind of Web browser because the Web currently is designed for 2D, said Hunter Sappington, a researcher with Parks Associates. "As solutions like Mozilla's become more...