The State of Streaming: As the Market Matures, Complexities Arise

The maturation of the streaming market is making success—and how we measure it—much more complex.

This means the streaming market requires a thoughtful approach to delivering a great experience to every user regardless of the device they are viewing. Consumers now expect nothing less than a high resolution and smooth playback experience at all times. Detection and root-cause identification of any barriers to an excellent experience is more challenging than ever due to the complexity of today’s streaming technology ecosystem. Diverse mobile-connected TV devices and associated video/app tech stacks, sophisticated cloud-based media preparation, content distribution, and advertising tech stacks all can contribute to more microscopic and subtle failure modes. Additionally, experience goes beyond just the quality of the stream. It’s also the ads that are served and the content published on social media. A strategic streaming TV publisher needs to consider every consumer touchpoint to content. Without a solution that allows them to measure and act upon problems occurring in real time, it’s hard to execute a thoughtful strategy.

This report analyzes the state of streaming in the second quarter of 2022, including a closer look at what’s happening in streaming viewership, device segments, ads and more. It’s based on data primarily collected using Conviva’s proprietary sensor technology, which covers a global footprint of more than 500 million unique viewers watching 200 billion streams per year across nearly four billion device applications. Embedded directly within streaming video applications, Conviva’s sensor measures content and ads to analyze nearly three trillion real-time transactions per day.

This State of Streaming report compares Q2 2022 data against Q2 2021 on a carefully cleaned, normalized, and aggregated basis. Common themes that emerged in this period include:

Bitrates are rising. Average bitrate increased universally across all regions, screen types, and top devices. Publishers are responding to customer demand for higher quality by releasing more of their content with all of the bells and whistles such as 4K, HDR and spatial audio. This increasingly includes prestige serial content, which has historically sat out the quality arms race. These trends continue to push up bitrates, sometimes at the expense of other Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics such as video start time. To balance the competing demands of providing high quality, feature-rich content while supporting a TV-like quality of experience for all viewers (not to mention containing delivery costs), publishers are adopting ever-more-sophisticated encoding and delivery optimization strategies.

The global growth of streaming is starting to mirror device adoption trends in the smart phone market. Lower-cost Android devices are surging in popularity as the streaming device of choice for markets outside of North America. We’re at a tipping point for Android vs. iPhone as Android Phone global streaming hours will likely soon surpass iPhone. Given the wide spectrum of hardware capabilities among Android devices and this segment’s increasing importance to bottom lines as publishers eye international expansion, any encoding strategy must be mature enough to support this diversity. And the measurement solution must provide the granularity to diagnose when something goes wrong on an obscure device model.

Streaming ads aren’t going anywhere. Advertising is becoming a ubiquitous presence in most streaming services. The lines between S-VOD and A-VOD are becoming increasingly blurred, with many publishers embracing hybrid monetization models and offering a broader range of packages and pricing to meet consumer demand.

Smart TVs continue to be the fastest-growing device segment in every region of the world. More viewers are watching more content for longer periods of time from living-room devices. Among those devices, streaming engagement is growing faster on Smart TVs than on dedicated devices and gaming consoles. As more manufacturers are building streaming apps into their TV operating systems, customers are responding to the cost savings and convenience by forgoing or neglecting additional devices.

Against the backdrop of a maturing streaming media industry and these emerging themes, how businesses put their data to work also gets more challenging each year. It’s changed the definition of what it really means to be data driven. Big-data dynamics, AI automation, global pandemic and all the other relentless trends have created a state where businesses are perpetually required to turn on a dime. Event-based, after-the-fact alerting solutions have become obsolete in favor of continuous real-time monitoring. This allows publishers to analyze the experience of a viewer’s stream while their session is still active. This evolved process sessionizes streaming events, state timelines, and metadata into viewer-level sessions to more accurately reflect the viewer’s real-world experience. Ultimately, it comes down to how (and how fast) we make sense of Internet-scale data to enable decisions and actions that businesses depend on.

This means you need a streaming analytics solution capable of:

  • Transforming data points from trillions of events across billions of applications into immediate, actionable insights – delivered quickly and perpetually
  • Guaranteeing a full and accurate picture across complete experiences based on sessionized data vs. a collection of data points
  • Ensuring your data is trustworthy, which means clean, enriched and standardized – and that everyone in your organization and ecosystem has access and is driving insights based on the same information

Industry leaders understand that getting this right can mean the difference between adding and churning subscribers, profit and loss, and winning and losing the streaming wars.

Q2 Highlights

It’s no secret that the second quarter of 2020 was a turning point for streaming TV. Streaming accelerated to extreme heights due to global lockdowns during the early days of the pandemic. These trends have become permanent, and streaming is now a standard fixture in consumers’ homes.

On the second anniversary of the quarter that changed the world, we continue to see year over year streaming viewing time increase on a global scale. All regions of the world saw increased viewing time, although not as drastically as in previous quarters. And while growth is good for the industry, other metrics show that streaming success is becoming more complicated.

Highlights include:
  • Streaming growth continues. Global streaming viewing time was up 14%. Asia and LATAM charted the largest growth at 90% and 70%, respectively. Even North America, the most mature streaming marketing in the world, increased viewing by 5%, a percentage identical to the first quarter of 2022.
  • Bitrate continues to rise globally. This phenomenon has happened at the expense of video start time (VST). Bitrate was the sole QoE metric that was up consistently across all regions, all screen types, and all top devices.
  • Big screens remain the streaming device of choice. In fact, they capture nearly 77% of all streaming viewing hours worldwide. Smart TVs posted the highest increase in viewing hours year over year for all device types.
  • Android TV viewing is surging. Android TVs are a top-five device in five of the six major streaming TV markets and saw an 81.9% increase in viewing hours year over year. Android TV CTVs have enabled the smaller OEMs to compete more effectively against Samsung and LG.
  • Android Phones rival iPhone viewing. There is less than 3% difference in share of total viewing hours on mobile devices between iPhone and Android phones globally. While iPhone still leads, Android phone increased their viewing hours at a much faster rate 24.9% (Android) vs 15.9% (iPhone) year over year.
  • Roku remains the most popular device in the world. This is due to massive North American market share, with Roku claiming a 23.1% share of all devices globally and 30.5% of all big-screen viewing.
  • Gaming consoles continue to see decline in streaming hours. This is despite ongoing hardware advantages and consistent improvement in QoE metrics.
  • Ads are here to stay. As streaming services around the world continue to announce ad- supported plans, existing streaming providers increased their ad impressions by 25% and reduced missed-ad opportunities by 35%.
  • Streaming publishers are leaning into social media. They continued to push for a 360 degree marketing approach as they increased content output on social media significantly compared to the previous year.

 

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