Netflix the Captain of Streaming, Pirates Rocking the Boat in US

Updated with new streaming services in Sweden, Finland and UK the 5th of July

The news of the death of TV has been greatly exaggerated. Despite the fast rise of Netflix and other streaming services, classic flow TV is still alive and kicking.

However, if flow channel executives look worried you can’t really blame them. Looking into the future, the demographic trend is very much against linear TV. As this graph shows, the majority of young people is streaming TV rather than watching classic flow TV.

The winner across almost all countries is Netflix, with only Sweden as the outlier. Interestingly, the picture gets muddy below Netflix with a lot of national and regional services battling for the 2nd place.

Spotify and YouTube dominate music streaming

Looking at music services, our study shows that Spotify and YouTube are the largest services in the European countries, while Pandora is main competitor to YouTube in the US.

For both music and TV streaming, illegal services is mainly a problem in the US. More than a quarter of people younger than 35 years have used a pirate service for watching TV, series or movies within the last week. The same number across all ages for American men is 20%. In the Nordics on the other hand, pirating is less of a problem to the industry.

Fragmented media consumption calls for validation and optimisation

A common denominator for this study and earlier studies is the fragmentation of the media industry. One interesting development to watch for, is what the disappearance of TV as a true mass media will leave in terms of gaps in the market. Flow TV is/was great at top-of-funnel advertising to a lot of people – quickly. In the digital ad space there is no equivalent to this.

With an increasingly fragmented device and media consumption, the need to adapt new channels to your campaigns is ever more important. This creates a need to recognise and validate which segments you reach where, enabling you to optimise your media spend across media and devices.

Get further insights

In the study below you can
Download the study below, to learn more about the TV and streaming habits in the US, UK and Nordics. Enjoy!