Futuresource Consulting has recently released its annual evaluation of the health and shape of global home video entertainment, detailing the macro trends of 2016, in addition to insights for 2017 and beyond. This latest analysis highlights that households are spending more than ever before on video entertainment, and in 2016, the combined home video and Pay-TV market totaled $251.5 billion, up by 3 percent comparative to 2015.

This market assessment reports and forecasts on consumer expenditure across digital video (SVoD, TVoD, EST, Pay-TV VoD), packaged video (DVD & Blu-ray) and the pay-TV market. Tristan Veale, market analyst at Futuresource Consulting shared some of the top line trends commenting that, “Overall video entertainment spend is set to rise to $280 billion by 2020, with a CAGR of 3 percent. In 2016, pay-TV accounted for 86 percent of global video entertainment spend with the pay-TV share of the market to remain stable as growth is in-line with spending on both physical and digital home video.

“SVoD was the standout performer of 2016 and momentum is expected to continue well past 2020,” continued Veale. “Globally we expected the market to reach 236 million global subscriptions at the end of 2016 and this is projected to almost double to 485 million by 2020. Netflix’s dominance in the sector is now facing a significant challenge from Amazon, with this space also being targeted by global entertainment companies including content producers, hardware manufacturers and telco’s who are attracted by the significant revenues.”

Veale added, “Global packaged video spend is in decline, with the deficit not being made up by transactional digital. Annual spend across DVD and Blu-ray fell by 13 percent to $21.6 billion in 2015 and is expected to fall to $9.1 billion by 2020. For 2016 an exceptionally strong late 2015 theatrical slate converted well to home video unit sell-through, the market also received a minor boost from the introduction of an even more premium tier of Blu-ray, UHD. However, the global rate of decline in dollar terms increased to 17 percent due to fluctuations in the exchange rate.”

This latest Futuresource report emphasizes that digital video progression is meteoric, driven predominantly by rapidly expanding Netflix. There are some concerns over the softness within the transactional digital video market with both rental and buy-to-keep currently under performing. Digital video spend reached $17.5 billion in 2015 with 60 percent of spend on SVoD. Following growth of 30 percent, 2016 digital expenditure reached $22 billion for the first time and exceeded that of physical which fell to $18 billion.

Futuresource is here.