Reinventing for growth in a changing media landscape

Another warning sign? Value. Put simply, consumers don’t feel that their buck is getting them as much of a bang as they’d like.

With wallets already under pressure from inflation and uncertainty about the economy, discretionary spending on streaming services will be an easy economy to make. Many intend to do just that, with 39% of consumers saying that they’ll decrease their spend on SVOD, and only 18% expecting their expenditure to increase.

Consumers also seem to have lost some of their appetite for binging on all-you-can-eat offers. Instead, they’re looking to make more defined choices and pay for what they want, when they want it. That explains why consumers increased their use of pay-per-view and transactional options more than any other service in the last year.

As well as placing limits on what and how they’ll pay for content, there’s another scarce resource that consumers will ration out: their attention. And there’s plenty of competition for that. Traditional 30-minute shows or longer films are fighting it out with a range of other attractions including gaming, social video and fitness.

The time that consumers devote to social video, gaming and fitness are all growing faster than traditional video. Over half (53%) of the consumers surveyed this year are spending more time on social video platforms like TikTok.

In many ways, traditional video is just the start of how consumers wish to explore and engage with content. They want to be able to follow up with relevant and related social media (47%) or user-generated content (38%). And they would like to be able to access related content like this directly through the app they’ve used to watch video.

Taken together, all these shifts in consumer attitudes and preferences point to the need for an entertainment platform – a diverse and broad ecosystem of engagement opportunities that meets consumers needs for simplicity, customization and the right mix of varied content and services – with flexible pricing and payments.

In fact, 86% of consumers say that they would be interested in a single app that can provide all the services they need on one platform and 41% would be interested in paying for it. And the majority of consumers would also value being able to access other services directly from their usual streaming home page: 70% for music, 63% for web browsing, 62% for ecommerce and 60% to connect with family and friends.

These platforms will provide both revenue security for media companies and logical experiences for consumers. But what roles will exist in the industry when these platforms emerge? Explore our report as we examine three aggregation roles for media reinvention and the business strategies, innovative monetization opportunities and profitability-oriented KPIs that are at the heart of them.