Amazon Prime Video launched across 200 countries today, which is a commendable achievement.
I don’t want to rain on its parade, but Digital TV Research believes that its subscriber penetration will be concentrated in a limited number of key markets – similar to arch rival Netflix.
In the recently published Global SVOD Forecasts report, Digital TV Research estimated that Netflix will have 118 million paying subscribers by 2021 – up by 30 million on the anticipated end-2016 total.
This is pretty impressive growth. However, most of these new subscribers will be in the 60 countries where Netflix launched before January 2016.
Digital TV Research forecasts that 9 million additions will come from the 130 countries added in January 2016 – growing from 2.1 million paying subs at end-2016 to 11.1 million by 2021.
This means that the 130 newer countries will contribute fewer than 10% of total Netflix subscribers by 2021, although this proportion is impressively up from only 2.4% expected by end-2016.
It also means that the average number of subscribers for the 130 newer countries will be a lowly 85,000 by end-2021 compared to an average 1,778,000 subscribers for the original 60.
