Parks Associates: More Than 200 OTT Video Services Now in U.S. Market

Parks Associates’ research finds that 53 percent of U.S. broadband households subscribe to both a pay-TV service and at least one OTT video service.

According to the OTT Video & TV Everywhere: Partners, Alternatives, and Competition report, more than 200 OTT video services are active in the U.S. market as of Q3 2017, with more than 100 active in the Canadian market. The report notes that 60 players introduced OTT video services during 2016 and 2017, while only seven services closed during that same period. More than 87 percent of OTT video services in the U.S. and 86 percent in Canada offer some type of subscription options today, including freemium, ad-free premium tiers and other blended business models.

“Many OTT services are evolving to be complementary to the market’s largest players, instead of trying to compete directly against Netflix, Amazon and Hulu,” said Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates. “Also, consumers are increasingly self-aggregating their OTT and entertainment service—they are adopting primary entertainment content sources and supplementing those sources with complementary video options.”

Sappington added: “Several factors are driving an increase in partnerships with and among OTT video services, including fragmentation of content, the success of bundling, polarization in the OTT subscription market, a low threshold for OTT service survival, and low awareness of many OTT service brands.”