Americans are tired of two things: cobbling together multiple streaming services to sate their entertainment needs, and ads according to a 13th edition of Deloitte’s annual Digital Media Trends survey reports Variety, an entertainment business news site. And they have reasons to be fatigued from consumer over choice thanks to an explosion of subscription based entertainment services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and many more planning to break and be part of this foray. All of them, despite this finding, are thriving because of the economic, social and emotional power of devoted fans and magnified by investment of these firms availing immersive content on demand.
Deloitte Findings
According to the survey, 47 percent of Americans are frustrated by the increasing number of subscription based entertainment services. However, up-to 57 percent are frustrated when they “when content vanishes because rights to their favorite TV shows or movies have expired” and because of this Kevin Westcott, Vice Chairman of Deloitte, is convinced that Americans “may be entering a time of ‘subscription fatigue.” He adds that despite the boom “consumers want choice — but only up to a point.” Furthermore, of the 2,003 responders, 77 percent were of the opinion that pay TV ads should not exceed 10 seconds.
Here’s what a Redditor had to say:
“The thing is that you don’t even have to have them all at once too. There’s no contract and it’s a monthly subscription. All you have to do is catch up on what you want over the course of a few months and then switch. I’ve decided to only keep 2 TV streaming services at a time and it’s working out just fine for me. It’s not like you’re going to be watching 15 different shows on 7 different services all at the same time.”
Why subscription is preffered by Businesses
But what could be triggering businesses to shift to this model? At first, it is easy to see why. There is guarantee of repeat business and businesses can easily scale hence delivering on their objectives. Coupled with auto-renew where content access is dependent on subscription the model is simply irresistible.
In auto-pilot mode, customers won’t run out of content simply because they have failed to pay. This way, “Predictability is not often a concern in a subscription-based strategy. It’s easier to get the needed data on the financial aspect of running a business” according to Eva Guerrero, the proprietor of EGDental.
At the same time, customers draw benefits “since the understanding that our customers’ spending decision is largely driven by their budget, we’re able to use a subscription-model offer to ease them into our services. At the end, this strategy makes bundling our other services in one a better option for them” says Nicholas Dutko, the CEO of Auto Transport Quotes.
Enter Coil
Luckily, there is a channel where Americans can vent their frustrations. Launched last year, Coil proposition could attract content creators diversifying their revenue streams and searching for the best offers. The fragmentation and “content” vanishing is largely because “micro-payments and subscriptions have always been built as closed systems, which fail to capture the huge variety of content on the web.” After Twitch, Google and Wikipedia experiment last year, it was demonstrated that creators can monetize their content by paying a $5 subscription fee as they receive XRP tips from users who have installed Coil’s browser extension. With Coil, the aim is to fix a “broken ad-supported web” and widespread adoption would surely reduce the number of webs and even reduce the shift to subscription models.
