Antenna Insights On The Subscription Economy

Specialty SVOD, the segment of the streaming video industry comprising services that offer programming tailored to specific areas of interests, has seen robust growth in recent years, outpacing its Premium SVOD counterpart (albeit off a smaller base).

Beyond the riveting competition, inspiring stories, and meme-generating moments, the 2024 Summer Olympics delivered huge audiences for NBCU. Paris 2024 also marked the first time the entire Olympics Games were fully available in the U.S. via streaming on Peacock.

Recent Antenna data shows that growth across SVOD continued to moderate in the second quarter of 2024. Overall, there were 45.3M Gross Additions and 43.3M Cancels to SVOD services in Q2’24, resulting in 1.9M Net Additions.

Annual plans have been successful in other subscription categories at mitigating churn, but have not been heavily used by video streamers. At the end of Q1 2024, Antenna estimated that just 4% of subscriptions across 41 SVOD services were to annual plans.

As linear television audiences continue to decline, causing a choppy ad market, there are real questions about whether ad-supported streaming can make up the difference.

With the maturation of the streaming industry and continued focus on profitable growth, services are increasingly working to improve and optimize their performance.

For media companies, the concept of bundling isn’t new. But as streaming continues to evolve, bundling is increasingly viewed by the industry as a tactic to both attract new customers and mitigate churn.

With many of the streaming services’ parent companies set to hold their Upfront presentations this week, we thought it made sense to check in on the ad-supported streaming segment.

Some Serial Churners manage their subscriptions, but others decidedly binge and cancel. Antenna has observed that among Serial Churners 38% have made three or more of their cancellations within the first three months of subscribing to a Premium SVOD service. In a media landscape where a user’s favorite shows can be spread across several different streaming services, this behavior suggests these users are “Show Chasers” who sign-up for a service to access specific content and then cancel shortly thereafter.