What brings me to the "Friday usual" article topic? It was noticeable and probably expected in the market of so many different streaming platforms, that all those subscribers are unable to stay forever at their first choice. Of course, we also saw how the US stock market reacted to the first Netflix subscriber rise miss. This comes back quite some time to the famous cord-cutting which - well all the time is moved - with its final taking over the cable business. By every year or every next report like the above one😀. It's not that I've worked so many years for one of the biggest cable operators in the country - it's just math. This calculation comes to the part of those press releases we got all over the new year that another big OTT is cutting budgets, and that new ad-supported packages are introduced to stop churn. Every Cable (or to be fair broadcast subscription) was there and now we have another "circle of life run".  

But back to the subscription cycling - so the behavior when a customer is signing up for some service and after watching one show cancels to sign up for another. This is of course possible because there is freedom of choice and easiness of cancellation with OTT. Well yes, and guess what happens when you want a good price for Sky/Showtime - you got a year upfront commitment but paid monthly - reminds you of something? Yup Cable package - but what's missing? Hmm, I'm not getting my favorite Disney show there ever. So I have to buy another subscription (just examples, it happens all the time everywhere)

To be clear I'm not here to raise a dispute that one is better or the other is worse. What I'm pointing out is that what once was a game changer now comes back to models that it was battling against. We gained a lot from those battles. We have technologies and convenience of consumption for all those titles, which is amazing.

There are definitely new models experimented beside ad-based subscriptions, year commitments (like the one above), or Netflix splitting Stranger Things S4 to extend some viewership for another period. That brings me back to the report and some numbers which show that some services have a really high percentage of customers switching after one month like Paramount+ or AppleTV+ (18% and 16% respectively) with Disney+ at 9% and Netflix at just 1%.  

This fragmentation and exclusive content are definitely pushing for those numbers to get higher. What's gonna be interesting will be the following months and how major players will handle the tricky balance between high-quality exclusive content and stabilizing churn (in some cases) or rising customer base (in other ones).

Link to full report by SambaTV https://rebrand.ly/kfvb9sn

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