Consumers Will Determine Next OTT Billing Model

Companies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple and Amazon helped drive the OTT video market past $8 billion last year, says ABI Research, with North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific reporting year-over-year growth topping 50 percent. The group predicts the continued adoption of connected and mobile devices will push the market past $20 billion by 2015. Comments Senior Analyst Michael Inouye, “While pay-TV services are still afforded many advantages, we are approaching the proverbial ‘fork in the road’ when content owners will decide if they continue down the same path or forge ahead, shaking up the primary means of media distribution as we’ve known it.” As an example, he says 58 percent of OTT video revenue last year came from subscriptions, but that will fall to less than 32 percent by 2018 – “driven by a continual shift in consumer demand towards newer forms of digital content distribution.”