Many people have considered streaming video a blessing, particularly those on road trips with children, which helps explain aggressive revenue growth projections for subscription video-on-demand (SVoD). And though the SVoD market has grown fast and continues to expand, its growth is slowing as it matures, as more streaming services compete, and the SVoD audience stabilizes – in other words, as the shine wears off. Because this high value market is changing, however, service providers can make streaming cool again by adding new value to it in ways that benefit streaming partners and customers but also move core operational costs out of the business.
Big SVoD growth begins to slow
The global SVoD market is slated to grow from roughly $81 billion in revenue in 2022 to more than $139 billion in 2027, according to Statista. In that timeframe, average revenue per user (ARPU) for SVoD services is also projected to grow from roughly $70 to $85 per year, or by about 21%. But growth is expected to peak at a healthy 18.6% in 2023 and to decline to 7.1% growth in just 4 years.
Because their revenue is already flattening, in many cases, streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon, Warner Media, and Disney face a market transitioning from raw growth to hyper-competition very rapidly.
Until now, the major streamers could focus mainly on customer acquisition while enjoying 25% revenue growth. But their focus must shift to keeping existing subscribers while finding cleverer ways to win new ones. For service providers, this change in the streaming market could spell long term opportunities to add value.
Adding value to video streaming
Service providers have often offered streaming as a one-off or add-on in the quad-play basket. Frequently, one basic-level streaming subscription may also be offered as a free add-on for mobility or internet subscribers. Rarely, however, have service providers offered an array of streaming choices to customers with options to try, change, add more, upgrade, or configure personalized streaming packages on the fly within the context of their broadband subscription or billing relationship.
But service providers have a chance to change the game and offer this kind of flexibility to customers, who in turn benefit from more choice, options, and personalization in the customer experience. For streaming providers, this can also provide an opportunity to market and re-market new varieties of their services at varying price points to semi-captive service provider connectivity customers, whose identities, billing histories, and payment methods are mostly known and verified.
Move cost out of the business
At the same time, service providers have a chance now to move cost out of their business, not only by transitioning various IT and networking workloads to public clouds, but also by shifting their core operations to streamlined and automated platforms. These should begin to eliminate the need for arbitrary divisions between, for example, the set of proprietary vendor systems engineers use to provision SD-WANs manually and those used to manage the ethernet backbone, metro-WAN, or 5G core.
Streaming services can be a great place to start a transition to a common, cloud-native provisioning, activation, and orchestration platform that spans both the legacy and cloud-native network and service worlds. Service providers can prove out the advantages of the technology live in the market, as some have with digital-only mobile brands, while making an incremental transition plan that reduces IT and operations costs on a strategic level.
One automation platform to deliver them all
Intraway’s Symphonica provides a ready platform to deliver streaming services to any suitable endpoint, in any combination, and according to any ordering, billing, payment, or eligibility rules managed in a BSS. The same platform, however, can deliver any service in a provider’s catalog to any type of end point, even if a service transits from a legacy network to more than one public cloud and back.
For example, were a video streamer to provide premium access to live 8K content over a custom 5G network slice that traversed multiple public clouds, Symphonica is the common solution to provision, activate, and orchestrate each component of the use case from cloud resources and 5G network slicing to the customer’s device and video streaming experience.
For the video streaming market to expand, it likely needs to diversify, which means service providers can provide the next-level platform that enables the next generation of innovation – and value realization – in streamed video entertainment.
To achieve it, a service provider can move forward rapidly with automated delivery of streaming offerings, but as a prelude to transitioning more network and service operations to Symphonica’s common, cloud-native, and automated provisioning, activation, and orchestration platform over time.
This will continue to reduce the cost to deliver services while helping service providers retire legacy infrastructure and integrations; eliminate manual processes and workarounds; and become far more efficient at service creation, delivery, and orchestration with a collective view of resources that Symphonica can put in play on-demand.
For a closer look at how Intraway Symphonica delivers automation, improves efficiency around subscription services, and helps service providers move costs out of their businesses, schedule your demo here.
