Half of US consumers unwilling to pay for streaming services

Nearly half of US consumers are unwilling to pay for even one streaming on-demand service, according to Parrot Analytics’ Global Television Demand Report.

The report, which focuses on the first financial quarter of 2018 and studied ten global territories, found that US consumers were least likely to sign up to SVOD services among the regions. The territories include Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, South Korea, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

In the UK and Brazil, consumers had similar results with 45% and 43% saying they aren’t willing to pay for a single streaming service, respectively. By comparison, 82% of Italian respondents said they were willing to subscribe to one of more SVOD services.

Brazil has the greatest percentage of people among the market willing to pay for four or more services reaching almost 15%, where only 4% of US respondents stated that they are willing to do the same.

Interestingly, in the UK consumers aged 55 to 64 make up 28% of subscribers willing to pay to three SVOD services, while people 25-34 make up 29% of subscribers willing to pay for four or more.

“We were really surprised how consumers’ willingness to pay for multiple SVOD services is different for each of these markets, especially Italy, and it was interesting to discover that US consumers were the most reticent of the four markets we examined,” said Samuel Stadler, vice president of marketing at Parrot Analytics.

“However, our findings were in line with the latest Netflix subscriber numbers, which show about 20% of the U.S. population having subscribed to their service – the same number we found that are willing to pay for one service, so that makes sense. What was also a consistent theme in our study is that for every market we looked at, males are more willing to pay for SVOD services than females.”

The top digital series in the US, Switzerland and the UK was CBS All Access’ drama Star Trek: Discovery, edging out Netflix’s Stranger Things. However, Stranger Things was the top digital series in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Greece, Italy, South Korea, and the Netherlands for the quarter.

Parrot Analytics ranks TV series across both SVOD and linear/broadcast channels in 100+ markets using its global TV demand measurement system, which collects billions of daily consumer Demand Expressions (streaming, downloading, social media interactions, blogging etc.) and then weights and ranks these audience demand expressions according to their significance.