Editor’s note: Yoshi Yonekawa is director, business planning division at marketing research firm Rakuten AIP, N.Y. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title, “To binge or not to binge. Part 2 – barriers of SVOD adoption.”
Netflix and Amazon picked up their first Oscars this year! This marks a turning point in the history of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) streaming services as they increasingly gain traction, catching up to the big screens.
An earlier edition of Asia Express looked at how common SVOD services were in Asia, namely the Philippines, Singapore and India. This edition looks at potential barriers to adoption. Why aren’t non-adopters jumping on board to subscribe to SVOD services?
For subscription-based services, it’s fairly common that price is a key barrier of adoption. This seems to be the case for the U.S., where it was the top reason for not subscribing to SVOD services (54 percent). The story however changes a bit when shifting focus to Asia.
Interestingly, pricing was less of an issue for the Philippines (44 percent) and India (30 percent). In India, more people stated that they didn’t subscribe since their TV wasn’t connected to the internet (42 percent) or that they didn’t like to be tied down to monthly subscriptions (44 percent). Being tied down was the top detractor for the Philippines (65 percent) and Singapore (59 percent).
(Among non-adopters of SVOD services)
This difference may in part be that the concept of monthly subscription-based streaming services is still fairly new in these Asian countries – introduced only in 2015 vs. 2007 in the U.S. Further promotion of benefits of monthly subscriptions vs. one-off purchases and rentals may help increase acceptance.
In the earlier edition, we saw Netflix securing a prominent position in the market for these three Asian countries. Among surveyed respondent...