Last March 16, streaming industry expert Dan Rayburn and NAPW’s Chief Marketing Officer Till Sudworth hosted a webinar to discuss the key takeaways from NPAW’s Streaming Industry Report 2021.
Published twice a year, NPAW’s report provides a comprehensive look into the current state of the global video streaming industry — all based on extensive quality of experience and consumption data insights from our customers from around the world.
Here are some of the highlights discussed during the webinar.
Lower VoD consumption per service
Chief among the report’s findings is the drop in daily video on-demand (VoD) consumption per user and service in 2021 when compared to 2020 – an average 9% decrease across regions.
“The video streaming industry is booming, and our data shows that, as a result, hours of consumption for each service have decreased,” said Sudworth.
“It’s incredible to see how many VoD services have gone global in the past years,” added Rayburn. “There’s so much competition that we can just consume each service for a limited amount of time.”
An overwhelming amount of choices
Another side effect of content and service saturation is how challenging it can be for consumers to find interesting titles to watch — a situation that overall decreases user engagement and satisfaction.
“Users want options, but we don’t want so many to choose from. The trend is frustration and fragmentation,” said Rayburn. “Companies are going to need to measure churn causes and the impact of the engagement on their service and bottom line.”
“We all often struggle to find new interesting content,” added Sudworth. “How are services going to refresh their catalog?”
A quality improvement
When discussing the evolution of streaming quality, Sudworth and Rayburn talked about how services keep pushing for higher bitrate levels while increasing join time to reduce buffer ratio.
“Buffer ratio is going down, quality is going up, and, overall, quality of experience is increasing,” explained Rayburn. “Consumers are willing to wait for premium quality video if it’s going to stream seamlessly afterward.”
And that ties to the key topic: quality of experience.
As Rayburn reminded the webinar’s audience: “It’s not just about the content for strategy. You can have the best content in the world but, if your user experience to consume that content is not good, it doesn’t matter.”
For Sudworth, the key to success is sticking to “a formula of three elements: appealing content, a great user experience, and high product stability and quality.”
But much more was covered…
Learn all other key insights from our 2021 report by accessing the full webinar’s recording.