More than 200 OTT services active in the U.S. market, research group says

Illustrating the insurgent competitive pressure being faced by incumbent pay TV operators, Parks Associates released a report today suggesting that there are more than 200 OTT services currently operating in the U.S. market.

According to Parks, 60 companies have introduced over-the-top video services just since the beginning of 2016. Over that span, only seven OTT services in the U.S. have shuttered. 

Notably, 53% of U.S. broadband households subscribe to both pay TV and at least one OTT service.

“Many OTT services are evolving to be complementary to the market’s largest players, instead of trying to compete directly against Netflix, Amazon and Hulu,” said Brett Sappington, senior director of research for Parks. “Also, consumers are increasingly self-aggregating their OTT and entertainment services—they are adopting primary entertainment content sources and supplementing those sources with complementary video options.”

In the latest Parks report, “OTT Video & TV Everywhere: Partners, Alternatiges and Competition, spearheaded by Sappington, the research company also looks at a growing amount of collaboration in the OTT market. Roku, for example, is reportedly talking to Apple and Google about extending its operating environment to smartphones. Pay TV operators, meanwhile, are aggressively looking to aggregate OTT services like Netflix and Hulu into their programming bundles. 

"Several factors are driving an increase in partnerships with and among OTT video services, including fragmentation of content, the success of bundling, polarization in the OTT subscription market, a low threshold for OTT service survival, and low awareness of many OTT service brands," Sappington said.

Other notable tidbits from the report: Eighty-seven percent of U.S. OTT services offer some sort of subscription component, and TV Everywhere awareness only stands at around 34% nearly eight years after launch.