Providing market intelligence for more than 35 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

Amazon's DVR Scheme May Be Taking Shape

"Over the past 18 months and longer we've seen a renaissance in live content, and a lot of that content is moving online with consumer habits," said Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Pa...

Nvidia's Turing Chip Opens Door to New Virtual Reality Realm

However, access for consumers likely is years away, according to Brett L. Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates, a market research and consulting company in Addison, Texas. "T...

Roku cuts price on top streaming player to counter Apple TV

Although it is much smaller than its rivals, Roku is the leading seller of video streaming players in the U.S. with a 37 percent share of the market, according to the research firm Park Associates....

Smart Homes: The Power, the Pleasure and the Pain

Amazon's servers were down for a large part of the morning on the day the outage occurred, taking Alexa-powered devices out of commission. Incidents like this may occur more often as the popularity of...