Is Premium OTT Content Worth the Price?
With over-the-top (OTT) content delivery pressing full steam ahead, both in terms of subscribers and number of OTT providers, common business sense would seem to dictate that commodity pricing would soon follow. Yet in mid-2017 that is not the case, nor is it likely to be in the near term. Here’s why.
When I finished the survey analysis for a recent Level 3 and Unisphere Research report on OTT video services, one surprising data point was the optimism about OTT revenue growth in 2017: double-digit revenue increases from 2016 were projected by 55% of survey respondents.
Based on that detail in the “OTT Video Services—Innovation, Opportunity, Maturation, & Technology Trends in OTT Delivery” report, my assumption was that the overall price of consumer OTT subscriptions would drop in due time, since revenues would grow based on a burgeoning number of subscribers.
The latter is true—subscribers are growing, with Amazon Prime Video north of 66 million subscribers and Netflix ending 2016 with 93.8 million subscribers worldwide, up from 17.4 million in 2015—but subscription prices are also trending upwards.
To understand the dichotomy of commoditization and premium pricing it’s useful to do as one of my MBA profs once told me: follow the supply chain workflow.
If raw material prices rise early in the supply chain, the cost is passed on to consumers of the finished goods. That may be a part of what’s happening here, as premium content is in more and more demand by OTT providers to service a growing number of subscribers.
Yet I don’t think it tells the whole story. After all, even when we’re discussing a limited amount of premium content in the market offered by a growing number of providers, the economies of scale rule should apply to our fast-growing OTT market.
“With all the non-stop mentions of how popular OTT services are,” Dan Rayburn wrote in 2016 on his StreamingMedia.com blog (go2sm.com/ottlicensing), “the one thing no one seems to be talking about is how any of these OTT providers are actually going to make money and become profitable.”
Rayburn posits that the reason that profitability is out of reach, even as revenues rise, is the cost of licensing or creating content.
“As we have seen with Netflix, scale doesn’t get you to profitability,” wrote Rayburn, “when the cost to license/create content is so high and the price you can charge the consumer each month is so low.”
I buy half of Rayburn’s argument, around the cost of licensing, but I don’t subscribe (no pun) to the cost of content creation going up, nor do I agree that the cost of monthly OTT subscriptions is too low.
When an OTT provider creates a piece of premium content and offers it exclusively on that OTT service for a period of time, it’s not really exclusive. What’s actually happening is that it’s being simultaneously being released in offline distribution models (what we call hybrid delivery in the recent OTT video services report).
Some of that distribution is through syndication licensing in non-OTT markets—a point brought home to me in Turkey a few years ago, when I was able to watch a major OTT provider’s premium content as a weekly episodic—and some of it is being distributed through traditional cinema, as we saw at this year’s Academy Awards with Amazon and Netlifx competing for Oscars.
One thing that may be happening—as was the case in the 1980s, as VHS home viewing hit the market—was the ripple effect in driving more premium content creation with a limited number of name actors. In other words, we could be at a point where every OTT service that wants premium content with a well-known actor or actress is competing against every other OTT service that feels it needs the same small group of thespians to drive continued subscriber interest.
If that were true, though, it’s a pity. That means we’re allowing a scarcity model—or a potential cabal, to those inclined to conspiracy theories—to dictate the cost of content in a classic king’s ransom. The pity is that we’re in a golden age with OTT where mid-premium content can be licensed and, if properly promoted, be a win both for the up-and-coming stars and the OTT providers itself.
Already there are signs that the reign of premium content may be coming to an end, as Netflix signaled in its recent earnings report, including a letter to shareholders from CEO Reed Hastings that highlighted a need to balance production costs with the quantity of films.
[This article will appear in the June/July 2017 edition of Streaming Media magazine under the title "Streams of Thought: A King's Ransom."
Related Articles
New annual Unisphere report highlights maturing OTT market, with most respondents saying OTT viewing will overtake broadcast within 5 years
20 Apr 2017