Demand for adding subscription streaming services in the U.S. is slowing down, according to new data from Kantar.
In the second quarter just 3.9% of U.S. homes took a new subscription to a streaming service, Kantar said, down from 12.9% a year ago.
The drop was the largest since Kantar started measuring.
Kantar says 74.6% of U.S. households now have an SVOD subscription, unchanged from a year ago. That represents about 95.8 million households.
Amazon Prime Video captured the largest share of new signups with 24.2%, up from its 13.2% share in the first quarter. Kantar said Amazon Prime Video benefited from free trial offers and from people visiting Amazon.com for online shopping.
“Both factors indicate that Prime Video is still benefiting from the upsurge of Amazon Prime subscriptions taken out during lockdown,” Kantar said.
HBO Max picked up 12.5% of new sign-ups, having gotten 14.4% of them in the first quarter. Discovery Plus, which launched in January, grabbed 9% of new subscriptions, up from 7.7% in Q1.
“In its first 6 months, Discovery Plus is already delivering a great onboarding experience for new customers which is rivaling Netflix. The two services sit in top place when it comes to ease of setting up service on device (8.6 average score) and sign up being simple and intuitive (8.6),” Kantar said.
Discovery Plus numbers bear watching because free trial periods are ending for many current users.
“Although only capturing 3% of the market penetration currently, if they can continue to boost their share of new subscribers and push out new content, Discovery+ could be a service to watch out for in the future,” Kantar said.
Netflix, the largest service, got 8.4% of new subscriptions, down from 8.5% in the first quarter and 14.2% a year ago, when it benefitted from the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Its installed base fell to two-thirds of U.S. subscribers, as viewers trade in for newer offers, Kantar said.
“Although share of the market outranks the competition, the saturation of the U.S. VOD market may be resulting in Netflix subscribers trading the service in for a newer model,” Kantar said.
Disney Plus’s share of new subscriptions was steady at 11.6% in the first quarter and Hulu (also controlled by Disney) had 5.9% of new subscriptions, a big drop from 10.6% earlier.
Also showing big drops were ViacomCBS’s Paramount Plus, down to 3.2% from 11.8% in the first quarter, and Comcast’s Peacock at 2%, down from 4.7%.
Apple TV Plus got 4.6% of new subscriptions, down from 5.6%.
