Social Video vs. Paid Streaming: A Report on the Race to Replace TV

Two race cars racing side by side with one car representing SVOD and the other representing Social Video
ILLUSTRATION: CHEYNE GATELEY/VARIETY VIP+

Pay TV. SVOD. Social video.

They aren’t often grouped together, but the latest data in the new Variety Intelligence Platform special report “Social Video vs. SVOD: The Race to Replace TV” suggests they can be thought of as a series of historical shifts in U.S. audience viewing behavior.   

First the cable business broke broadcast TV’s stranglehold in the 1980s. Thirty years later, Netflix led a field of successor streaming services that siphoned eyeballs at equally sizable scale from linear TV

And now even though streaming is hardly done in terms of its growth relative to broadcast and cable, there are signs of a paradigm shift already in motion: a third wave of fragmentation in which social video begins to eat into the market share of major streaming services.

Data keeps mounting that video consumption on the big social platforms — primarily YouTube, TikTok and Instagram — is growing strongly, with users spending more time on these platforms each year. In this report, VIP+ provides a data-driven probe into how this viewing may impact time spent with subscription video.

To shed light on that behavioral shift, the report features exclusive data provided to VIP+ from research firm Maverix Insights, collected by its measurement platform Media IDentity Graph (MIDG).

Capturing zero-party data on digital behavior from 50 million U.S. consumers across all devices, from the big screen in their living room to their iPhones, MIDG enabled a comparative view of unprecedented scope for both short-form video and streaming video usage. 

VIP+ also puts the social video viewing trend in the larger video context, delving into the rapid decline of traditional TV, shifts in advertising spend and changing video content preferences among consumers, particularly among generations Z and Alpha.

The race is on to replace linear TV as the video option that commands the most viewing hours in the average American’s waking day. But make no mistake, this will be a marathon, not a sprint.

Read on to learn about:

1

Reams of exclusive data on growth trajectories of social video relative to SVOD

2

The broad implications of a generational paradigm shift in video-viewing habits

3

Demographics for viewing patterns of short- and long-form video across platforms