The greatest fear for streaming services has been churn. This is the practice of subscribers canceling a service after just a few months or sometimes before the free trial is over. Now Bloomberg gives us some insight into how many streamers and cord cutters stay with a streaming service once the free trial ends.
According to Bloomberg, just one third of streamers stick around after a free trial ends. Even more scary for streaming services is 10% of subscribers to streaming services like Netflix, YouTube TV, and Disney+ cancel every single month. The good news for these services is even though they are losing 10% of their subscriber base every month the number of new subscribers is typically outpacing the number that cancel.
As you can understand subscriber losses of 10% every month is scary. Some streaming services like Apple TV+ and Disney+ will be releasing shows weekly instead of all at once to help fight churn. The hope is that they will be able to keep subscribers.
Others like Netflix have opted to offer a growing list of high quality exclusive programming that you can only get with the service. Even more have used promo offers with a free Roku as long as you agree to pre-pay for several months.
The fight to figure out how to keep subscribers in a post-contract world will likely be one of the biggest battles of 2020. Some like AT&T are even trying to put contracts on streaming services like the new AT&T TV service that comes with a two-year contract.
The question now is what system will win out. Will weekly releases be the future of streaming or will Netflix win out with its system of offering such a huge collection of original content it keeps people subscribed.
Which system do you think will win out? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.
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