Disney+, which houses Marvel movies, has seen subscriptions grow during the pandemic. Photo / Supplied
One streaming service has registered huge growth over the past year, according to an audience survey.
"Disney+ has been the stand-out performer since launching in late 2019. Subscriptions to Disney+ grew rapidly during the pandemic and the growth has continued with the service now attracting an audience of 1.25 million, an increase of 481,000 ( or 62.8 per cent) on a year ago," Roy Morgan chief executive Michele Levine says.
And Nielsen NZ's latest survey (see below) put Disney+ at number two.
Amazon's Prime Video was another big mover, albeit off a lower base, jumping 56.6 per cent to 460,000 viewers, according to Roy Morgan's survey (viewership is greater than the number of paid accounts. None of the services break out an NZ subscriber number).
Prime has recently made two big plays to boost its lineup, buying MGM Studios, home of the James Bond franchise for US$8.5 billion, and spending a record-breaking $1 billion on The Lord of the Rings - The Rings of Power (the first series of which was shot in New Zealand before Amazon decamped to the UK for even juicier subsidies for series 2).
Streaming: 34.8% share of total TV viewing in the US
— Chris Keall (@ChrisKeall) August 18, 2022
Cable: 34.4%
Broadcast: 21.6%
In NZ, Nielsen recently added streaming to its home panel mix - but no figs made public yet https://t.co/UbxC2uBnND
Rings of Power will debut on September 2, with new episodes available weekly (like Netflix with the arbitrary drawn-out parts 1 and 2 of the latest Stranger Things season, Amazon is nudging away from the binge paradigm as streaming customers become less loyal).
Both surveys focus on paid streaming services, but in an interview about TVNZ's latest financial results, released this morning, chief executive Simon Power said TVNZ+ (formerly TVNZ On Demand) reached two million Kiwis in the past year.
Roy Morgan poll manager Julian McCrann said his company's survey has TVNZ+ on 1.26 million viewers.
Sky TV made solid gains in streaming over the past year as gains from its Neon and Sky Sport Now apps more than offset customers lost from its decoder business. The pay-TV broadcaster says its total streaming subscribers increased from 160,000 to 436,000 over the past three years; see table below.
But to bed in its transition, it will need a smooth rollout of its new box, which supports both the delivery of traditional Sky channels over UFB fibre and supports third-party streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.
If all goes to plan, the new Sky box becomes a one-stop-shop for content that's broadcast or streamed. And it will also be a boost that Sky's new hardware will support 4K ultra high resolution, helping to close one of the painful gaps between Sky TV and streaming services on a big screen TV - where a lot of Sky content looks poor, while Netflix et al's 4K images look gorgeous (although of course there will be no helping content on Sky's retro channels that was shot in the standard definition days).
It's a clever play, if it can be pulled off without too many hitches. But it would have been more clever five years ago, when far fewer people had smart TVs, complete with Neon and Sky Sport Now apps already onboard (Spark Sport may or may not be remembered as a long-term success, but it definitely pulled middle New Zealand - kicking and screaming, in many cases - into the world of Chromecasting and smart TVs).
Disney upended the landscape when it launched Disney+, and punters have obviously taken to it in droves.
It's going to be the trendsetter again over the next year, but possibly not in a way that will have consumers so thrilled.
First, a quick rewind.
Disney pulled its content from pay-TV providers around the world (including Sky TV here) in order to make its own Disney+ the exclusive online home to most of the content in its stable - which now includes Pixar, Star Wars, National Geographic and Star (which includes content from what used to be 20th Century Fox, before it was gobbled up by The Mouse House).
The direct-to-consumer model adopted by Disney+ has blown away analysts' expectations over the past three years.
Earlier this month, Disney said it had added 14 million streaming subscribers during its June quarter (defying predictions of a post-lockdown slowdown).
The bump saw Disney overtake Netflix in total streaming subscriptions worldwide.
Netflix lost 1 million subs in the June quarter to finish at 220.7 million.
Disney says it now has 221.1 million streaming subs (151 million for Disney+, and the balance for Hulu and ESPN+).
Now Disney+ is about to trend-set again - only this time, not in a good way, from its subscribers' point-of-view.
From December, Disney will introduce ads for American viewers of Disney+, which will remain priced at US$7.99.
Those who don't like that change will be able to pay US$10.99 (a 38 per cent increase) for an ad-free version.
There's still no word on if or when Disney will add ads and bump up pricing elsewhere. Presumably, that'll depend on how it goes down in the US.
Netflix has hired Microsoft to build an ad platform for its streaming service, with commercials expected on some plans from next year (although Variety has reported Netflix's ad platform, being buiilt from scratch by Microsoft, wil launch in November to get in ahead of Disney+ ).
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Netflix plans to sell 15- and 30-second ads that would appear before and during some programs, ad buyers said. The company is looking to keep the ad load to four minutes of ads for every hour of programming on a new lower-cost plan (those who continue with a full-price plan will avoid the commercials).
At TVNZ, Power says paying to avoid ads on TVNZ+ is something that's been considered, but there are no immediate plans.
Why the Disney+ overhaul? Because beyond the viewership graphs, not everything is rosy.
Disney's streaming division lost US$1.1b in the June quarter, more than triple its loss of US$293m a year earlier (the firm still made a US$1.4b profit overall, thanks to rebounds in its profitable theme park and movie studio businesses).
And at its June earnings, Disney actually downgraded its forecast for total streaming customers by September 2024 from 240 million to 260 million to 215 million to 245 million after losing Indian Premier League streaming rights (to ViacomCBS-owned Paramount+, which paid just over US$3b - just one of several deals illustrating that, following a brief Covid lull, the cost of sports rights has resumed its stratospheric ascent).
Here, Sky has some breathing space, having secured multi-year deals for the big sports in its stable. But as Amazon and Apple (with Apple TV+) continue to expand their sports rights portfolios, and more and more codes experiment with direct-to-consumer apps, it's another area where streaming will continue to disrupt.
Beyond covering streaming in its omnibus SMI survey, Nielsen has plans to add streaming to its home people meter panel.
Back in October 2020, the firm said it would add streaming meters to the 500 households that make up its Nielsen Television Audience Measurement (TAM) panel.
With a streaming meter now in every Nielsen household, local broadcasters should be able to get a better handle on the size and shape of the multi-national streaming services' audiences and how their own on-demand services are stacking up against them.
This enhancement, in partnership with Think TV (a new media insights vehicle collaboratively run by TVNZ, Discovery and Sky) will include a measure of viewing to all internet-enabled devices in the household in addition to traditional "linear" TV viewing.
"The streaming meter is a piece of hardware that monitors streaming via wi-fi and Ethernet and measures passively alongside a panel member's router," Nielsen NZ country manager Tony Boyte told the Herald in May.
"And yes it will capture all forms of streaming to every internet-enabled device in the household.
"So for the first time, we will be able to measure if someone watches Netflix on any device in the household."
So where are the first results? It's still a work in progress.
"We completed the integration of meters on to 500 households on the TAM panel earlier this year," Boyte said earlier this week.
"At this point, we are working on making the information we are collecting fully representative of NZ viewing. That mainly involves increasing the coverage of data we are collecting to all devices in the home - and not just the TV - and then also getting an accurate weighting regime in place."
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