With over 193 million subscribers, Netflix is currently at the top of the streaming platform’s metaphorical food chain. Founded in 1997, it only truly launched itself as a streaming platform in 2012 and with it’s first original “House Of Cards” in 2013, it instantly reached global recognition.
Amazon Prime is reported to have reached 150 million subscribers as of January 2020. This makes it only the second streaming service to do so. But Amazon Prime is split into Prime Video, Prime Music and Prime Reading among other streaming platforms. This multi-optional model has been extremely successful for Amazon so far and it shows in the form of it’s customers.
But there is a third main platform coming up recently. Launched recently in November 2019, Disney+ reached it’s profit target of 60 million subscribers in less than a year (Granted most of it is from India’s Disney+Hotstar). This is surprising (to put it mildly) because it was estimated by Disney themselves that they would reach their profit target only by 2024. That means they reached their profitable target four years in advance.
To give an insight into how hard it is to gain subscribers, here are a two examples as explained by Lightshed analyst Rich Greenfield. It took Hulu over 8 years to gain just 13 million subscribers. It took Netflix 8 years to add 13 million subscribers in one year. In comparison, Disney hasn’t even completed one year since it’s launch and it has already reached stratosphere-level of paying customers.
This has taken Disney+ to a place where only Netflix and Amazon Prime resides. These OTTs don’t have to worry anymore about things like marketing, branding or name recognition. Of course they are still globally expanding, but now Disney+ has to work on what Netflix (and Amazon) has been doing for years; retaining their subscribers.
This boom in subscription is well and good but it has happened partly because of the coronavirus outbreak. Even Netflix has got 26 million new subscribers in just 6 months of 2020. Maintaining these many new users is going to be the hard part. But with the extensive library of content for both OTTs, it will be easier for them to retain customers than most other OTT streaming services.
When media executives were asked about how many OTT platforms would be ‘ the big winners’, we were given a range of three to six by John Stankey (AT&T CEO), Jeffrey Hirsch (Starz CEO) and Jason Wong (Product Management Director, Hulu). And there are of course other platforms (besides the three discussed) such as HBO’s HBO Max which recently gained 4 million subscribers in just 2 months, Comcast’s Peacock which has reached 10 million subscribers this year and Hulu has 35.5 million subscribers.
So if we take their words into account, we can say Netflix and Amazon Prime as the clear ‘big winner’ with Disney+ joining them as well. The other two or three ‘spots’ on the list will probably be fought between HBO Max, Peacock, Hulu, AppleTV+ and ViacomCBS.
Let the OTT Hunger Games begin.
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