Global platforms are diversifying into video and using it to solidify their core business proposition.
In a wide-ranging presentation at the Connected TV World Summit, Tom Morrod, VP – consumer, displays, media, security and telecoms, IHS Markit, said that the market has already fundamentally changed, with OTT accounting for a third of global video subscribers, and five of the top 12, headed by Netflix, Tencent Video and Amazon, being pure play OTT.
Moreover, Google and Facebook are the world’s largest ad platforms both in aggregate and for video.
Global platforms are now diversifying and have been able to scale in a completely different way to previous platforms. Just as importantly, many now also dwarf pay-TV because they are not constrained by the footprint of their local network.
Morrod gave the example of Google (active Android devices) and Facebook (monthly active users), which as of 2017 reached close to 2.5 billion and just over 2 billion users respectively. This dwarfed services such as Netflix, while the global pay-TV market, headed by China Telecom and AT&T, had a combined total of just over 1 billion subscribers.
Yet despite this, on a global scale companies adopt two different positions, with ones such as Amazon, Apple and the global pay-TV sector focused on technology and bundles. and Netflix, Discovery, YouTube and Facebook on content and advertising.
An important trend is that some companies are breaking out of traditional bundles, while others are recreating bundles outside of traditional networks. However, traditional network owners have started to re-bundle unbundled content channels, such as with Netflix.
All this points to video being used by different companies for very different reasons.
In the case of Amazon, for instance, it is used to drive Prime subscriptions, which in turn drive retail. In terms of programming spend,
Apple is expected to invest $1 billion in procuring and producing original content this year, and Facebook $1 billion on original content.
Google will meanwhile spend several hundred million on YouTube Red content.
