Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Declining iTunes Video Share

Mikey Campbell:

Citing Hollywood studio sources, The Wall Street Journal on Sunday said Apple’s share for selling and renting movies, as well as other video content, has dropped to between 20 percent and 35 percent, down from over 50 percent as recently as 2012.

The steep decline comes as competitors Amazon and Comcast enjoy market share gains on the back of aggressive industry moves.

[…]

Interestingly, the loss of market share is not uniform across genres, the report said. For example, iTunes is a top distributor of independent movies, as Apple promotes and signs exclusive deals for films made outside of the traditional movie studio system, sources said.

Apple’s own video revenue has gone up, but the market as a whole grew faster.

Jason Del Rey and Rani Molla (via Hacker News):

Someday soon, more U.S. households will be subscribers of Amazon Prime than cable or satellite TV, according to recent estimates of Amazon’s popular shipping and entertainment service.

According to estimates from Morningstar, nearly 79 million U.S. households now have an Amazon Prime membership, up from around 66 million at the end of last year.

I wonder how many use Prime for video and how many have both cable and Prime.

Previously: Amazon Prime Video Coming to Apple TV.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

FWIW, I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Comcast Xfinity for video, and I find them useful in that order. Probably 3/4 of the video watching in my house is through Netflix, another 20% through Amazon (which has some very solid original programming), and the remaining 5% through Comcast. Comcast's software is miserable (actually multiple steps backward in functionality from the software they had a year or two ago), and the commercials are even worse. Technically, I guess we have video access through iTunes, but the last time anyone in the family bought/rented a video appears to be six years ago! (We don't have an Apple TV, nor does there appear to be any demand for one in the family.)

"I wonder how many use Prime for video and how many have both cable and Prime."

Yeah. That article is comparing apples and orangutans.

------

"Apple’s own video revenue has gone up, but the market as a whole grew faster."

But most interestingly to me in that article is that the entire VOD market shrank in revenue in the last year, due to folks using all-you-can-eat services over VOD.

(It was already obvious to me that Apple's VOD share has been collapsing over the past few years.)

@Chucky Yeah, and as someone who doesn’t watch very much, I’m not that happy to see all-you-can-eat service take over.

Leave a Comment