The State of Streaming Services: Trends, Predictions, and Key Strategies

How Customers Are Streaming Media in 2024 and Beyond

While Blockbuster rentals may not seem all that long ago, streaming services are what dominate viewers’ attention—from music, to podcasts, to television and films, customers are constantly connected to their streaming providers, spending over 5 hours a day using this type of media.

But just as the rise and fall of Blockbuster felt unexpected to true 90s kids, media marketers need to ensure that they’re always on the ball when it comes to customer behavioral trends. To stay a step ahead, get the scoop on the latest trends affecting streaming services today, and gain some valuable campaign inspiration to power your upcoming strategies.

Serial Streamers and Churners

While the desire to consume as much streaming content as possible may suggest a steady flow of customer loyalty, the landscape in the years ahead will be more complex than that. In the last year alone, nearly a quarter of US adults canceled three or more subscriptions, primarily due to streaming services ballooning their fees despite the ever growing rise of cost-of-living.

This cocktail of issues will lead to two results: unsurprisingly, 32% of customers have traded in their subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) services for free alternatives, and more are expected to follow suit. A less expected result is the rise of serial churners, customers who frequently delete their streaming provider, only to resubscribe shortly afterwards when content piques their interest.

Drive Unique Brand Value

The formula to help your customers go against the grain and stay plugged into your streaming services is driving home your unique brand value. Practically, this will look like generating messaging that showcases the content customers want to explore, similar to the recommendations module in Peacock’s year-in-review.

Using customers’ streaming activity throughout the year, Peacock perfectly summarized each viewers’ most notable moments. Not only that, Peacock used customers’ previously watched shows to power recommendations to get them watching more content in the new year. Through this data-driven technique, the campaign drove an impressive 20% reduction in churn rate, a 6% lift in upgrades to paid subscriptions. Additionally Peacock saw a 2 percentage point lift in content return rates, meaning that customers streamed content within a week of receiving the year-in-review campaign.

Diversify Revenue Streams 

Another way marketers can stymie churn and boost revenue is increasing the value customers gain from their brand, whether that’s through diversifying services or driving upgrades. By doing so, customers become more committed and ultimately would have a harder time finding the same convenience and level of service from another brand or a free offering. Sky Germany’s biweekly sweepstakes email is the perfect example, as its messaging highlights a plethora of services.

In this fully automated email, an XML is used to pull imagery, descriptions, and CTA copy from content that is normally blockaded by a paywall. From there, the email’s template and color scheme is updated based on  each customer’s loyalty status—Silver, Gold, or Platinum—while generating content that would drive them to take their next-best step. As this example shows a sports fan, the hero content is dedicated to matching football content.

Further down in the email, the sports customer is encouraged to delve into the brand’s television shows, and their previous interests and activities are used to craft the perfect recommendations. Personalized CTAs perform 202% better than generic versions, proving the value of this automated newsletter. 

Gamify the Experience

Finally, marketers can improve the streaming experience by incorporating gamified tactics that encourage customers to engage with their emails. As gamified add-ins are often automated, engagement plays like scratch-offs and polls are a reliable quick-win for marketers.

Warner Brothers Discovery Plus makes gamification a habit, as displayed in their new-release email. No custom set-up was required to highlight the streaming service’s latest show, and by adding this simple functionality to this reveal email, the brand saw an impressive 51% increase in CTR.

Customers Want Streamers to Speak Their Language

The final trend to be covered is that streaming providers are looking to international markets for further growth. As reflected in Netflix’s latest earnings report, their increased revenue is due to their renewed focus on the European market, while their activity in the US has remained stable and steady. Picking up shows and movies from around the world is an obvious and necessary step, but marketers also need to get to work on quickly and efficiently creating content that accommodates international audiences and makes their emails feel like home to customers.

Warners Brothers Discovery Plus is again a step ahead, this time with their data-driven headers. To echo the international spirit of the Winter Olympics, the streaming brand looped in 9 API feeds to create a multi-functional content block that also increased their efficiency by 75%. 

Through this single automated block, Warner Brothers was able to generate content in 7 different languages. The block not only visualized the latest competition data, but brought in regionalization; the top 4 rankings would show the best-performing countries in that event, while the 5th place rank would show the country that customer was from, no matter how that team was performing.

Keep the Stream of Success Coming

By organizing your strategies around these key trends and taking inspiration from these successful campaigns, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the pack and keep the stream of revenue, engagement, and loyalty flowing.