The number of available 💻"Over-the-Top"📱(sports) streaming services does not only continue to proliferate, but these over-the-top services remain also in 🚀 full customer acquisition mode — vying to a large extent for the same set of consumers and their limited resources such as ⏱ time and 💵 disposable income. One consequence of purely focusing on maximizing subscriber growth in the short-term, which has become the vanity metrics of choice when it comes to valuing streaming video or music services, is that subscription prices have reached an unsustainably low level. 📉
What's more, other revenue streams that could potentially slow down new sign-ups are either totally dropped or used very sparely to provide the best user experience possible in the short term. In order to make locked-up wallet share available for these new digital subscription services, though, consumers are ✂ cutting the cord and dropping out of the traditional 🔌 cable / 📡 satellite pay-TV ecosystem. The challenge for rights holders, who continue to pay skyrocketing rights fees for the rights owners' IP: The level of monetization for acquired media rights in the OTT space comes not even close to the traditional pay-TV bundle yet as current ARPUs have been greatly depressed -- given the lack and degree of exploitation of potential revenue streams. ☝🏼
In light of these observations, I tackled a few key trends in OTT streaming that could become relevant in 2020 and beyond as well as the implications for content providers to move from a B2B2C business (with pay-TV operators as middlemen) to vying for consumers in a D2C marketplace, including:
1️⃣ Re-Addition of Revenue Streams in the OTT Space 🤑
2️⃣ Fragmentation and Aggregation is of Cyclical Nature 🔁
3️⃣ "Streaming Wars" - A poorly-named Catch-All Phrase 🤨
4️⃣ Balancing Existing with Future Revenue Streams 🤯
5️⃣ Content Migration: Combination of OTT Streaming and Free-to-Air Television as the Future? 📱 ↔️ 📺
Underlying a lot of these trends is the expected migration of live sports programming from linear pay-TV to digital streaming services. In contrast to the siphoning of such content from linear free-to-air television behind the paywall of satellite and cable television starting in the 1980s (in North America) and 1990s (in Europe), I do not expect a full migration to a new ecosystem (i.e. subscription-based streaming services) this time around. Instead, what's old could be new again: 📺 free-to-air linear television (and 💻 streaming services) — which have been railroaded by satellite/cable subscription channels for more than a decade.
