The OTT market has been making huge waves. A recent report predicts that by 2027, a whopping 4.2 billion people will be using OTT video services, which is pretty impressive.
Do you know what that means? Around half of the world population will be using OTT services by 2027.
Over the last five years, the number of OTT users has shot up by 45 percent, going from 2.4 billion in 2018 to a massive 3.5 billion in 2023. This data comes from OnlyAccounts.io.
Statista Market Insights adds to the story, noting that back in 2018, about 2.4 billion folks around the globe were into OTT video. Fast forward just two years, and that number skyrocketed to over 3 billion. And the growth didn’t stop there. In 2021, 300 million more people hopped on the OTT train. There was a little dip of 82 million users in 2022, which was the first in a while, but the trend picked right back up in 2023.
In total, over a billion people joined the OTT video club between 2018 and 2023. This boosted the market’s reach from 33.2 percent to 45.6 percent during this period, as the report highlighted.
The big streaming players like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and Disney+ have been splurging billions on making new content. They’re all racing to get more viewers, and this has driven the total number of OTT users to incredible heights.
Every major service provider has seen their subscriber counts double or even triple over the past five years. This growth frenzy has pushed the market’s overall revenue to new records. In 2023, these OTT video providers are set to rake in nearly $295 billion, a whopping three times more than the $98.7 billion they made back in 2018. And guess what? Around 70 percent of that huge pile of money will come from the US, China, and the UK, the three biggest markets.
Now, when it comes to how they’re making all this dough, OTT video advertising is the big moneymaker. It’s expected to generate a whopping $176.6 billion this year, which is nearly 60 percent of the total revenue. Crazy, right?