Video Subscription Penetration Rises, with Growth Led by Ad-Supported Platforms

February 24, 2022

This article is included in these additional categories:

Digital | Industries | Media & Entertainment | Video

With about half of streaming video subscribers saying that, for them, streaming has replaced traditional TV, it’s perhaps not a surprise that in Q4 2021, overall US subscription video penetration grew to 85%, per data from Kantar.

The data shows that the share of US households that had at least one video subscription service in Q4 2021 rose 2 percentage points over Q3, bringing the number of US households with a subscription video service to 109.4 million by the end of December 2021. The growth in Q4 comes after declines in the share of households subscribing to a service in both Q2 and Q3 2021. 

Free ad-supported TV (FAST) services such as Peacock, IMDB TV and Roku Channel saw the largest quarter-over-quarter growth during the last quarter of 2021, with penetration growing by 4.9 percentage points over Q3. With this growth, Kantar’s data shows that 18% of US households use a FAST service.

Continuing the trend in the growth in the adoption of ad-supported video streaming (AVOD) services, AVOD subscription penetration also saw above-average quarter-on-quarter growth in Q4 (+3.5 percentage points). This is while SVOD services saw only slight growth of 1.8 percentage points during the same quarter. 

For the third consecutive quarter, Amazon Prime Video had the largest share of new subscribers in Q4 2021, accounting for 20.3% of new SVOD subscriptions (excluding free and ad-supported services, but including activated bundle deals). Second on the list of SVOD services with the largest share of new subscriptions, Disney+ brought in 13.3% of new subscriptions during the quarter.

For its part, Apple TV+ garnered 8.8% of new SVOD subscriptions in Q4. And, although other research shows that three-quarters of those viewers who have subscribed to a streaming service in order to watch a specific show have kept that service after the show ended, Kantar notes that Apple TV+, after seeing growth in Q3 and Q4 due to its hit show, Ted Lasso, is now expecting higher planned cancellation in Q1. 

Read more here.

About the Data: Findings are based on a quarterly survey of 20,000 US consumers.

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