OTT exceeds TV in the UK!

According to Ofcom, there are now more OTT Video Subscriptions than pay-TV in the UK, a historical moment for TV & home video. UK is among the first international markets to follow USA trend, where SVOD surpassed TV already in late 2016. 

What market will be next? (Sorry for the blatant plug here, but obviously Ovum has global TV & OTT forecasts that will tell you exactly what market will be next, and when!) But for sure, most mature international markets are heading that way.

There is a central conflict here though, and that is that OTT Video (i.e. SVOD & SLIN) are essentially low ARPU services. While OTT is set to overtake pay-TV in terms of subscribers pretty much everywhere in the foreseeable future... there is a real risk of a whole lot of revenues being lost!!

As we've have argued for a while now, SLIN services don't have to be priced according to Netflix. If you're providing multiple premium linear channels via streaming, be sure to maintain price parity with traditional TV packages.

So far though there is little proof that majority of linear OTT services (or SLINs) are priced higher than Netflix. If SLINs are to help transition pay-TV onto the internet, the risk is sleepwalking into a situation where, yes, subscriptions are transferred but not revenues.

In short, don't build a future business based on the mistaken idea that consumers do not want to pay for premium TV & video.

It's all about timing!