Today we’re unveiling the first installment of a new quarterly report series we’re calling “Antenna’s State of Subscriptions.” Each quarter we’ll be focusing on a different industry segment of the subscription economy by digging into the data, trends, and critical insights subscription marketers need to understand to manage and grow their businesses. For our inaugural report, we’re looking at Premium SVOD.
For Premium SVODs, 2022 represented a turning point. While total Subscriptions grew substantially at 14.1% over the prior year, that rate of growth was significantly slower than 2021’s 28.9%.
The category is experiencing tremendous volatility, even at a time when many Services have announced greater focus on managing toward profitability. Antenna observed 117 million Cancels across Premium SVODs in 2022, up 49% from the prior year. Gross Additions grew 18% from the prior year, to 143 million.
The Upshot: We are entering a new era for the category. Service operators have shifted focus from pure topline acquisition to a more sophisticated set of operating principles, and we should expect more targeted acquisition strategies; increased focus on pricing and packaging; and numerous moves to mitigate churn.
In this new focus on “profitable growth,” Antenna highlights five factors we see in our data that we think will be important in the year ahead: Pursuing scale; Revenue optimization; Dual revenue streams; Owning the customer relationship, and Customer segmentation.
If you're interested in reviewing the full report, send us an email and we'll share a copy with you.
For more detailed information on Antenna’s methodology and definitions of core metrics, please visit http://www.antenna.live/methodology.
Brendan Brady is a Content Strategy Associate at Antenna, a measurement and analytics company providing insight into purchase behavior and subscription metrics across the new media landscape.
