ONE IN SEVEN GLOBAL OTT HOMES ARE BORROWING ACCOUNTS

One in seven online video households worldwide are “borrowing” an account, according to Ampere Analysis’ latest research. The company defines an account borrower as those who say they are using a login for a subscription online video platform from someone outside of their household to access a service.

Borrowed services might include mainstream TV and film products such as Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime Video, but also include sports streaming services and niche content services. A silver lining for the OTT players is that most consumers using another household’s login say they would pay extra for a service that gives them the content they want.

In the past 12 months, the proportion of global Internet users that are borrowing an account has increased, rising from 8% in Q1 2019 to 11% in Q1 2020.

Ampere estimates that there are 70 million households borrowing one or more OTT accounts across 22 markets worldwide. This represents roughly one out of every seven households which has access to a subscription OTT service. The trend is highest in India, followed by the Netherlands and France, and lowest in Japan. Account borrowing is also growing fastest in the United Kingdom, China and Indonesia.

Furthermore, account borrowers are more likely than average to be younger and students. However, over 50% have full-time jobs and household incomes on-par with the average consumer. This means that a large proportion of the group does have purchasing power.

Sports programming is particularly attractive to a subset of account borrowers. In Europe, a greater proportion of users of sports services such as NBA League Pass and NFL Game Pass are account borrowers. This is partly due to the seasonality of sport. Account borrowing by these users is likely to only be for a specific period, or by casual fans who don’t feel they watch enough to merit paying for a subscription.

“We can see that households swap login details with friends and families to access other platforms, and we predict that as the subscription OTT landscape continues to fragment and consumers are faced with an increasing number of platforms to choose from, this borrowing behaviour will become more prevalent,”  said Minal Modha, Consumer Research Lead at Ampere Analysis.

●  HOW WILL SUBSCRIPTION OTT SERVICES RESPOND?

Many of the borrowers are legitimate paying customers. Three-quarters subscribe to at least one subscription OTT service, representing over 50 million households. Additionally, two-thirds have pay TV at home.

With over half of borrowers saying they don’t mind paying extra for something that gives them exactly what they want, there could be an opportunity for subscription OTT players to convert borrowers to buyers. Already pay TV operators and aggregators are providing bundles with built-in discounts. 

“With 50 million account borrowers paying for another subscription OTT service and more than two-thirds taking pay TV, it’s clear that these consumers are not averse to paying for content. Subscription OTT players need strategies to respond to an increasingly saturated market and entice consumers with a finite budget for content to pay for their programming – even if that means changing tack and allowing them to dip in and out of subscriptions or for bite-size chunks of content,”  Modha concluded.