There’s something wrong with Parks’ latest OTT headcount. It is widely taken as fact that the US is the world’s leading market for SVoD even on a per head basis – with 70% of the country’s broadband households watching OTT video regularly, according to Parks. The firm’s OTT Video Market Tracker has reported that the US is keeping its distance over Europe, where it ranks the UK as the continent’s largest market with 55% of homes viewing OTT content regularly, followed by France on 51%.
But these figures do not quite ring true and underestimate the total extent of OTT viewing in some European countries, especially the UK. The problem lies in the difficulty and ambiguity in counting OTT. It is relatively easy to measure the SVoD totals, which Parks does quite accurately, putting the US at 64%, UK 30% and France 17%. But the implication is that in the US, SVoD accounts for nearly all of OTT viewing, but only a minority in France, with the UK in between.
SVoD is obviously not the only OTT video format. Consequently, Parks seems to still underestimate French OTT viewing given how it has been pushed by leading pay TV operators, as well as broadcasters – notably Orange with its HDMI dongle launched in July 2015, enabling viewers to watch any of its channels and services, including the Dailymotion YouTube equivalent, over any broadband service.
In addition, each of the country’s DTT networks, including TF1, M6 and France Televisions, have long been offering catch up online, while the aggregation portal TV-replay.fr bringing all of them together has been available since 2009. The latter alone has around 5 million regular viewers, but with all these services accurate totals are hard to splice out of the data collected. Typically, data includes total numbers of requests and numbers of unique browsers over a given period.
Taking the BBC iPlayer in the UK for example, there were 18.4 million unique browsers or devices accessing the service in January 2016. On the one hand this counts device owners more than once if they have viewed from more than one device but on the other hand fails to account for multiple viewing on say a connected TV. It also doesn’t count iPlayer viewing via pay TV services such as Virgin Media or Sky, which in any case may not count as OTT. But by some estimates total OTT viewing in the UK and France is now well up with the US when we take all these catch up portals into account and it is just for SVoD where the US is still streets ahead.
We also wonder whether Parks is properly counting all the OTT linear services in Europe, both TV Everywhere variants and also dedicated offerings from established platform operators like Sky’s Now TV.
There are also a few dedicated streaming platforms making a big impact in Europe, notably Sweden’s Magine TV, a cloud based network serving broadcasters. This is not only a notable force in the Nordics but is also forging ahead in Germany, where it now has almost 2 million registered users.