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Karlene Lukovitz of MediaPost writes that, "25% of SVOD subscribers and 32% of new signups are now ad-supported." 25% of SVOD subscribers, subscriptions, and 32% of new signups are now ad-supported, according to Antenna. Both numbers, the 25% and the 32% are up from 18.

Netflix with ads is trailing streaming rivals: The service is struggling to compete with recent entrant Amazon and has lowered CPMs.

We believe Netflix remains the most watched service in the world, but it is not alone at the peak.

Netflix tallies its ad-supported subscriber count ahead of Upfronts: A survey shows it could have 22 million US subscribers as it enters an Upfront period rife with competition.

All eyes are on streaming. Last year, non-pay TV viewers surpassed traditional pay TV viewers in the US, per our forecast. Years of streaming platform proliferation are over, yielding to consolidation and fragmented ad measurement. Bundles between streaming platforms and partnerships with retail media platforms are forming, leaving media buyers with a headache over how to strategize.

YouTube Premium hits a subscription landmark: The service now enjoys 100 million subscribers after YouTube spent much of 2023 cracking down on ad blockers.

The year of streaming price hikes: Streaming services became more expensive than ever in 2023, leading to a focus on bundles and cheaper AVOD tiers.

Connected TV (CTV) ad spend will exceed $30 billion in the US next year, according to our forecast. At a growth rate of 22.4% YoY, that makes CTV one of the fastest-growing ad formats we track. But where those ad dollars are coming from isn’t so simple.

Something else that's also interesting to watch is that because there are so many subscription video on demand players and the costs of these services keep rising outside of bundle offerings and ad supported tiers, something that is seeing significant growth are free ad supported streaming options. Things like Tubi have been doing very well. Roku has been doing well.

But across all the subscription video on demand players, ad-supported tiers are now commonplace. So I think that is something that will be evident for many, many years. Man-Chung Cheung (11:55):. Yeah. So just speaking from the APAC's perspective, and I don't want to pigeonhole the entire region, but I think people have been fairly frugal. They are really price-sensitive.

SVOD is regular Netflix. AVOD, advertising video on demand, is Netflix with ads. Then you've got the FAST that we talked about in an episode last week, the Roku Channel, Tubi, those free ad supported streaming services. Then you've got YouTube that's been watched on a TV. You've got streaming TV services like FuboTV and Hulu with live TV. A lot of different things are caught in that CTV definition.

I think the biggest surprise is it might look a lot like traditional linear TV, so looking beyond just these SVOD platforms, you've got to consider fast as well. Free ad supporting streaming TV, we project that there'll be 150 million fast viewers in the US in 2027. These channels carry ads. You've got the ad tiers on the SVOD platforms of course. You've got sports rights being sold to these players.

So the graphic includes paid SVODs, free and supported streaming TV services, called FASTS for short, and vMVPDs, which is a heinous acronym, but it's also known as streaming TV services. When you rank them by total viewers in the US, all of those different types of services, the top seven are SVODs, led by Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu, each with about 120 to 170 million users.

Research company Antenna noted that November was the first month they observed the majority of signups for premium SVOD services going to ad-supported plans versus ad-free ones. So the majority of signups going to ad-supported versus ad-free.

And there was a recent NextTV article from Dave Frankel, noting that Netflix was still watched more than twice as much versus any other SVOD in the US during Q2, only YouTube, excluding YouTube TV beat Netflix in US streaming minutes during Q2, and that was only slightly. The Disney bundle, Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, if you added all of those up, they're the next closest to Netflix in terms of usage.

And now you have streaming becoming more like linear with so many of these SVOD services having live programming that comes from their affiliated broadcast like watching live NBC or CBS content on Peacock and Paramount Plus. Marcus Johnson:. Mm-hmm. Story two.

It's also Netflix and basically every other subscription video service is really feeling the fact that they need to increase revenues. Just adding new users isn't cutting it anymore. If the news was Disney loses 11 million subscribers in Q2, but average revenues per user are up like 50%, I don't think this would be viewed as bad news, really. It would be more mixed, or maybe even positive.