As the streaming business has moved from a focus on subscriber growth to management teams touting the importance of profitability, the sector has also seen the rise of mentions of such quality-related measures as subscriber retention and “engagement.”
“Engagement is critical to reducing churn, [which] might be the most significant opportunity we have,” new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro said on a recent earnings conference call.
But not all “engagement” is created equal, which explains why its meaning has also started to get questioned and, in response, fine-tuned.
Should engagement simply be another word for viewing time, for example? Some industry executives have started arguing that the answer to that question is no. “All hours of engagement are not the same, and we really care about the quality of that engagement,” Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said during an earnings conference call earlier this year. But how to best compare different engagement metrics and rhetoric touted by different players?
Now, one prominent Wall Street expert has crowned the king of streaming quality and unveiled his new MoffettNathanson Streaming Quality Index. And the ranking of streamers based on it may surprise some.
MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman shared his analysis in a Wednesday report, accounting for how viewership hours give a streamer the ability to create revenue via subscriber retention and gains, price increases and advertising revenue. He focused on such key factors as daypart viewership, content demand, franchise depth, prestige, as well as sports and live events programming.
The MoffettNathanson analysis led to a ranking topped by… drumroll, please!… Disney, followed by HBO Max. Disney, “on the strength of its unmatched franchise depth and sports portfolio, and HBO Max, driven by the prestige of both its series and films.”
In a move that some may consider a surprise, the analyst lists Apple TV+ third, ahead of the much bigger Netflix, whose performance is “driven by its content demand leadership, which we believe suggests its programming is best positioned to close the monetization gap over time, even if franchise depth and sports remain modest today,” and Amazon Prime Video.
Are streamers ready for the engagement quality-focused phase of the streaming wars?
