IBB Consulting study: almost half of US broadband customers subscribe to at least one OTT video service
About one-third take two, and 18% subscribe to more than three, IBB survey finds … Reflecting the surge in consumer adoption and volume of subscription VOD services …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months before this IBB survey, comScore put OTT reach at 53% of WiFi-enabled US homes, with Netflix inside 75% of them — so penetration was already established. What IBB adds is depth: about a third of broadband customers stack two services and 18% take more than three, turning OTT from a single-subscription habit into a multi-slot competition.
That stacking number is the hinge for everything the corpus tracks afterward — the subscription fatigue surveys, the churn-when-adding behavior, and the eventual turn toward ad-supported tiers all presuppose households carrying multiple paid services.
First-order effects
- With nearly half of broadband customers already paying for at least one OTT service, growth shifts from winning a household's first subscription to winning its second and third slot — a contest among Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and the entrants behind them.
Second-order effects
- Stacking creates the churn dynamic later surveys quantified: among users planning to add a new OTT service, most said they would downgrade or cancel an existing one, meaning providers are fighting over a roughly fixed household video budget rather than net-new spending.
Third-order effects
- Once stacking saturates, the marginal subscriber gets cheaper through advertising than through another monthly fee — the shift Parks Associates later measured in ad-supported and freemium usage — pushing OTT economics from pure subscription toward hybrid models.
The trend: US video consumption is moving from single-service OTT adoption toward stacked subscriptions, where churn, cancellation trade-offs, and ad-supported tiers discipline how many paid services a household will carry.