OYSTER BAY, N.Y.—While Disney+ has already proved immensely popular among consumers, its continued success, and the emergence of other subscription-based services, are key behind ABI Research’s projection that by 2024 the OTT video market will be more than $200 billion.
According to a new report from ABI, 90% of that $200 billion in OTT video revenue will come from SVOD and advertising. Already ABI has seen subscriptions in the Asia-Pacific region growing significantly, primarily in China and India.
However, pay-TV is not being shut out of this growth. ABI says that the pay-TV industry has been embracing OTT as an added value rather than competition, and that over time traditional pay-TV may “become indistinguishable from a pure OTT package of services,” said Michael Inouye, principal analyst at ABI Research.
In 2019, there were more than 700 million OTT SVOD subscriptions globally, while there were more than 1 billion subscriptions for pay-TV. ABI notes that pay-TV growth is slowing (even declining in North America), but it believes that the overall market is expanding.
“Increasingly, we’re seeing more solutions and conversations about bringing content and services together,” said Inouye. “This includes pay-TV and OTT bundles and extends to cross-platform advertising, analytics and customer/service management. Ultimately it makes the market more accessible to a wider range of companies and expands the potential video touchpoints, particularly as new technologies like 5G, smart home and augmented/virtual reality play larger roles.
ABI’s full report, “OTT and Multiscreen Video and Digital Content,” is available on its website.
