Paramount +, the latest participant in the streaming wars, launches today, promising a mix of classic TV shows and movies, early access to some Hollywood blockbusters and reboots of things you didn’t know you wanted to restart: coming back, Frasier Crane.
But in a way, the things that the new ViacomCBS service offers may be less important than the time of its launch. This happens after all the other big media companies have launched their own streaming service. Which means that Paramount + is entering a very competitive market.
And that means, most likely, that ViacomCBS isn’t just trying to get someone to pay $ 10 a month for Paramount + – it probably also needs that person to drop something else. Antenna, a subscription analysis startup, says U.S. consumers subscribed to just 1.5 streaming services in January 2021.
Two years ago, when streaming services still basically meant Netflix and Hulu, that number was 1.25. Which means that while we’ve seen a number of services being launched recently, most people are still not paying for them – and even if they take out their credit card to sign up, they’re likely to stop paying for them after sampling.
Antenna, which claims to use data sampled from online bill payment services to assess what people are actually spending money on, has exposed the challenge that ViacomCBS faces quite clearly in the data sets below. But the easiest way to sum it up might be this way: (Almost) everyone already has Netflix.
This chart, for example, shows us that 75% of people who recently purchased Netflix in the first half of 2020 are still paying for the service – a higher survival rate than all of their major streaming competitors. Meanwhile, only 34 percent of new subscribers to 2020 Apple TV + are still paying for the service now. (The antenna data does not include streamers that are receiving free promotion services like Disney’s Verizon package or the free Apple TV + trial that Apple offers customers who buy some Apple hardware, such as new iPhones.)
And yes, some people – perhaps the people reading this article – actually subscribe to many different streaming TV services. But it is a very small minority.
Meanwhile, Netflix customers were less likely than other streaming subscribers to pay for anything else – which probably has to do with the fact that (almost) everyone has Netflix. It’s the initial streaming package: you get it first and maybe think about adding something else.
The good news for ViacomCBS, in a way, is that people who have subscribed to their existing services – CBS All Access, which is being redirected to Paramount + and Showtime – are already more likely to subscribe to other services as well.