BritBox, the SVOD service backed by BBC, ITV and AMC Networks, said it has generated about 250,000 subscribers about a year after its U.S. debut and soon after its expansion into Canada.
Among other updates, BritBox said it has doubled the number of available hours of content since launch, now exceeding 4,600 hours of British TV programing. BritBox said it has also committed to a 50% increase in original and acquired programming investment for this year.
BritBox goes for $6.99 per month in the U.S. and is supported on several platforms, including Roku, Apple TV, iOS and Android mobile devices, the Chromecast streaming adapter and web browsers. It is also offered through Amazon Channels, Amazon’s SVOD aggregation service for Prime members.
RELATED: Bullish About British TV
BritBox has reached its subscriber milestone amid an explosion of SVOD services and a market that now appears ripe for a correction or a shake out. For more on that trend, and what SVOD services, including BritBox, are doing to differentiate in a fragmented market, see this week’s cover story in Broadcasting & Cable.
RELATED: SVOD Shakeout: The Survival of the Fittest (subscription required)
Strategy Analytics estimates that more than 250 million homes currently subscribe to a streaming video service, and is poised to grow to 300 million by the end of 2018, and 450 million by 2020. Those numbers are focused on SVOD, and do not include virtual MVPD services such as DirecTV Now.
The research firm also found that the average monthly household spend on streaming video services rose 5% in 2017, to $9.46, and that the average household is paying for 1.39 streaming services.
