Big 5 OTTs account for 83% of the streaming

The five big OTT services in the US -Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and YouTube- represent almost 83% of all the streaming hours in April 2020, according to figures from Comscore presented during the webinar State of the OTT delivered by James Muldrow, the company´s Senior Director Product Management. In the January-April 2020 period, the services that grew most were Hulu (17%) and Disney + (14%).

During the presentation, Comscore examined the evolving landscape in the industry in 2020 due to the growth of the services, contents, and OTT devices, as well as the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic in consumers` behavior.

Another finding was that consumption on mobile devices and desktop increased from 43 billion total visits to over 64 billion total visits in the week from February 3 to 9, 2020 to the week from April 20 to 26, with the 10 main categories being Education, Entertainment, Family and Youth, Financial Services, Games, Government, Health, Information and News, Retail and Social Networks.

Muldrow commented that as a trend, even the traditional devices are the ones that prevail, but connected TV (CTV) is increasing. Smart TVs have been growing solidly in the last two years, close to some 13 million devices. The brands that have grown the most are Samsung, Alcatel/TLC, Vizio, and LG.

“OTT content visualization has become a general behavior,” he detailed. He said that 70% of homes in the US are using OTT somehow (70 million homes). He mentioned that, on average, some 52 hours of OTT are watched per home monthly since 2019.

The conclusions he mentioned include: OTT is growing steadily, the increase of the scope of platforms supported by advertising presents a need and an opportunity for advertising, video content is driving consumption, and content consumption is growing both in homes and in total hours.