Commerce technology firm Bango has consolidated three of its regional “Subscription Wars” reports released earlier this year into a comprehensive global report that examines some of the biggest trends in subscription streaming and bundling.
The report, called “Subscription Wars: Global Trends,” includes data points from more than 16,400 subscribers in the United States and several European and Latin American countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Peru.
The report hits on central themes that were found in Bango’s three regional papers earlier this year, including an uptick in subscription fatigue, a desire among consumers to have a centralized platform for managing video subscriptions and an increased interest in bundling different subscriptions together.
The majority of subscribers surveyed across the three regions affirm there are “now too many subscription services to choose from,” Bango said, with 80 percent of Latin American streamers finding the statement to be true, compared to 68 percent of streamers in the U.S. and 65 percent in Europe.
American streamers are more likely to lose track of how much they spend on subscriptions, with one-third saying they’ve lost track of their subscription budget, compared to 28 percent in Europe and 27 percent in Latin America.
Related: Streaming trend taking over Europe, but consumers already feeling financial pinch
More than half of all streamers across the three regions say they want to opt out of automatic subscription renewals and are frustrated that they can’t pause their subscriptions whenever they’d like. One-third of customers in the U.S. feel they’re locked into their current subscriptions, compared to just over one-quarter of subscribers in Latin America and Europe, according to Bango’s surveys.
The situation is made worse by a trend across markets that has seen subscription video on-demand (SVOD) services like Netflix, Disney Plus and Paramount Plus increase their subscription fees about once per year.
“While this has driven growth and innovation in the industry, it has also piled financial pressure on subscribers, who are increasingly hitting a price ceiling,” Bango said in their report. “Well over half of subscribers we surveyed simply cannot afford all of the subscriptions they want.”
Related: A Conversation With Giles Tongue, Bango’s VP of Marketing
The average American now pays around $924 per year for subscriptions, and 57 percent of them have canceled at least one subscription due to recent price increases, Bango said. The amount of money spent toward subscriptions in the U.S. is higher than Europe ($762) and Latin America ($444), though customers in those regions are just as likely to cancel a subscription compared to the U.S.
For years, streamers addressed the cost of subscriptions by sharing their passwords — which, while illegal, helped address the growing costs associated with their services. Until they didn’t. Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) and others have increased their crackdown on password-sharing, booting freeloaders from their services and incentivizing them to pay for their own plan by pushing them toward ad-supported tiers, which tend to be lower in price compared to commercial-free options.
“The crackdown on password sharing has proven effective across all regions, particularly in the Americas,” Bango said, noting that the company’s data “suggests that many users who were previously sharing accounts are now opting to pay for their own subscriptions.”
Which might explain why customers feel their subscriptions have become too expensive and unmanageable.
One way subscription providers can help customers and churn rates alike is to offer their services through content hubs like Verizon Plus-Play (stylized as Verizon +play) and Optus SubHub, which offer subscriptions through Bango’s Digital Vending Machine.
Sixty-eight percent of Latin American subscribers say they’d use their services more often if they could sign up and manage their accounts through an all-in-one subscription platform, according to Bango’s data, while 54 percent of Americans and 46 percent of Europeans affirm the same.
Related: Latin American consumers want streaming TV bundles, Bango report says
Seven out of 10 American and Latin American subscribers want to be able to pay for multiple subscriptions from a single bill, according to Bango, while half of European subscribers said the same. Not surprisingly, 54 percent of Americans said they’d like discounts on their subscription services, while 41 percent of Latin Americans and 35 percent of Europeans also wanted discounts.
For telecom providers like Verizon and Optus, adding subscriptions and bundles to bills means customers are paying more — but customers appear OK with that, according to Bango, who found 58 percent of Latin Americans surveyed were willing to pay a higher bill if it meant their subscriptions were included. Forty-seven percent of Americans and 38 percent of Europeans said the same.
Most said they’d prefer for their wireless or mobile phone carrier to offer subscriptions through their bills, including 50 percent of Americans and 55 percent of Latin Americans — though that might be based on familiarity. In the United States, all three major wireless providers — T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T — have offered complementary or low-cost streaming subscriptions through post-paid plans for several years now.
That offering is still relatively new to other service-based firms like cable and satellite providers, which have only recently come around to the idea of offering third-party subscriptions and bundles through their platforms. Earlier this year, Comcast unveiled a new product called Stream Saver (stylized as StreamSaver) that includes access to Netflix, Peacock Premium and Apple TV Plus for as low as $15 per month, charged to the same bill that customers pay for their Xfinity TV or Xfinity Internet services. (Like Verizon and Optus, Comcast is a Bango client, The Desk previously reported.)
Bango refers to the trend as “Super Bundling,” which gives “content providers instant access to a ready-made distribution, marketing and billing network offered by telcos and other channels around the world. The company’s Digital Vending Machine makes those “super bundles” possible by connecting telecoms and similar service providers with subscription-based offerings like Netflix, Duolingo, Nord Security and Uber One.
“While full-service content hubs like Verizon Plus-Play are on the rise in the USA, there’s still more to be done to make them mainstream,” Paul Larbey, the CEO of Bango, said in a statement. “Content hubs have yet to properly break into the European and LATAM markets even though the demand is there from consumers.”
Larbey said the aggregated report makes it clear that “subscribers want choice and flexibility, without the annoyance of juggling multiple accounts and bills.”
“Super Bundling through content hubs finally brings that level of flexibility — aggregating multiple services into one single platform with ease,” Larbey stated. “It’s an approach that puts the subscriber first while allowing subscription services to share users rather than fighting over them.”
To download the “Subscription Wars: Global Trends” report, click or tap here.
