Consumers spent an average of $69 per month on video streaming services during the third quarter of last year, according to the latest research from Parks Associates. The average is understood to be down around 25% from the $90 per month noted in early 2021.
A lot has happened in the world over the past few years, much of which has had an impact on how people use streaming services. By early 2021, the pandemic had resulted in many more people staying at home and unprecedented levels of subscription service usage. By the start of 2023, there appeared to be somewhat of shift away from worrying about the pandemic and towards worrying about the economy.
Those points and trends now also seem to be evident in the latest research which suggests that consumer spending on video services has fallen 25% in the past two years. Technically, the research from Parks Associates focuses on the third quarter of 2022 and draws comparisons with the first quarter of 2021 – when consumer spending on video streaming services was understood to be at an all-time high.
Based on that data, the level of spending has steadily decreased throughout 2021 and 2022. For example, following Q1 and its $90, the monthly average decreased down to $85 in Q3 and then down to $81 in Q1 of 2022. The latest drop being another $12 bringing the average total down to $69 for Q3, 2022.
In spite of this, Parks Associates continues to make the point that market saturation is at a high, with 87% of US internet households having at least one streaming service. This compares to the 45% that are understood to now have access to five or more OTT services.
In other words, it doesn’t appear that consumers are necessarily using streaming services less often or are signed up to fewer services, but more of a case of them now being more selective on which services they are using. More specifically, paying for.
What’s also interesting here is the fact that $69 per month is now less than what many live TV services charge for their cheapest base plan. For example, neither DirecTV, Hulu Live TV, fubo, Vidgo, or YouTube TV charge less than $69.99 per month.
It would seem that while live TV streaming services continue to increase their prices, consumer monthly spending on video streaming services continues to drop.
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