Streaming video booming but viewers complain they are overwhelmed

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 12/04/2022

Streaming video consumption is booming with for instance CNN recently launching its CNN+ but a new report shows that consumers are overwhelmed by choice. Close to half of the US audience (46%) feel overwhelmed by the growing number of services and platforms that has made it difficult to find the content they are looking for, measurement firm Nielsen says in a report called State of Play.

Overall, Americans increased their average weekly time streaming video by 18%, with a year-over-year increase from 143.2 billion streamed minutes to 169.4 billion between February 2021 and February 2022.

Two takeaways:

• Streaming service consumption is expected to grow, with 93% of Americans reporting they will increase their paid streaming services or make no changes to their existing plans over the next year, and over the last three years there was an 18% increase in all available video content.
• Due to a nearly 20% increase in unique program titles over the past three years, nearly half of audiences (46%) feel overwhelmed by the growing number of services and platforms that makes it more difficult to find the content they’re looking for.

“Consumers want access simplified and the explosion of services has renewed discussions around bundling and aggregation. Ultimately, these challenges signal an opportunity as the industry harnesses streaming for long-term business growth”, says Brian Fuhrer, SVP, Product Strategy, Nielsen.

Subscription video on demand (SVOD) accounts for 53% of minutes streamed. Of the 4 hours, 49 minutes per day that the average time spent watching content, 1:22 of that is through connected TV (CTV).

In February consumers had 817,000 unique program titles to choose between compared to 646,000 in December 2019.

“The increase in content also comes with an increase in consumption, as 18% of Americans are now paying for four streaming services vs. the 7% who did so in 2019.  In February of this year, content from streaming platforms accounted for just under 29% of consumers’ total time with TV, ahead of broadcast programming (26.4%) for the fourth straight month”, according to Nielsen.

64% of respondents indicated they wish there was a bundled video streaming service that would allow them to choose as few or as many video streaming services that they wanted.