OYSTER BAY, N.Y.—Perhaps the death of traditional pay-TV has been exaggerated. That is one possible take away from a new report from ABI Research that finds despite the growth of video streaming platforms, the worldwide pay-TV market is expected to see a rise in subscribers by 2024 that would surpass 1.1 billion.
ABI’s report does not argue the fact that streaming is impacting the pay-TV market, particularly in North America, where cable, satellite and IPTV services in the region lost 1.2 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2019. A big reason for the rise in popularity of streaming services is the availability of high-speed broadband and a multitude of streaming services, according to ABI.
However, the popularity of streaming services varies from region to region depending on price points, content choices and stability of video delivery across different platforms, and in many emerging markets traditional pay-TV services remain the top choice.
Another way that pay-TV providers are looking to compete with streaming services is by offering their own live streaming services for lower costs compared to traditional TV packages. Other attempts include the deployment of Android TV set top boxes to integrate streaming and pay-TV services. The use of these kind of set top boxes are becoming popular in emerging markets as well.
In addition, analytics is a contributing factor to pay-TV services ability to keep and grow its customer base. “Analytics solutions based on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can provide comprehensive insights on content consumption, prediction of churn, etc., which is valuable for content recommendation, improving user interface and proposing best-fit packages to customers to prevent or reduce subscriber loss,” said Khin Sandi Lynn, an ABI industry analyst.
This information is from ABI’s Pay-TV Subscribers market data report. For more information on the data, visit ABI’s website.
