Providing Market Intelligence for 40 Years

In The News

Streaming wars will force media companies to choose between pricey subscriptions and ads

Parks Associates, a research firm that tracks the connected home, found in a recent survey that one-third of U.S. broadband households use a free, ad-based streaming service, up from 24% a year earlier.

“Consumers are turning to ad-supported streaming services as subscription fatigue continues to settle in,” Brandon Riney, a researcher at Parks, told CNBC in an email. “When discussing attitudes regarding ads on these streaming services, more consumers are willing to endure the ads to watch the content than completely resisting them.”

“As the purse strings of OTT consumers tighten, there is tremendous opportunity for free ad-based services to thrive,” wrote Steve Nason, an analyst at Parks Associates, in a post in November. “A service can establish a foothold in this space by delivering a unique offering of high-quality content in an engaging advertising-based environment.”

From the article "Streaming wars will force media companies to choose between pricey subscriptions and ads" by Megan Graham.

Previously In The News

Bluetooth 5 Is Out: Now Will Home IoT Take Off?

Range has quadrupled in Bluetooth 5, so users shouldn’t have to worry about getting closer to their smart devices in order to control them. Also, things like home security systems – one of the most co...

OTT Services Make Pay TV Look Like a Poor Value, Parks Finds

When consumers can get a streaming video service with live channels and an on-demand library for $15 per month, their $80 per month cable or satellite service starts to look like a poor value. That's...

One-Third of U.S. Broadband Households Have Multiple OTT Subs

According to the researchers at Parks Associates, 31 percent of all U.S. broadband-enabled homes have multiple over-the-top (OTT) service subscriptions. Also, 63 percent subscribe to at least one OTT...

Roku is Making TV Speakers, But They Only Work with Roku TVS

The idea behind this is that if your TV sounds better, people will stream more, which is the metric Roku cares most about, Klarke says. Roku likes to say that it's the US's number one streaming conten...