The 2010 state of Internet VOD: TV

Last week, I looked at which legal streams were avail­able for movie box office win­ners . This week, I inves­ti­gate how inter­net VOD ser­vices are far­ing when it comes to offer­ing top rated TV shows.

Approach

The first part of my inves­ti­ga­tion was to find data that pre­sented the top TV series on tele­vi­sion in the United States in 2010. Sur­pris­ingly, that data was not that easy to get but Deadline.com had a list of the top shows that could be used.

Because news shows, vari­ety shows, sport shows, and real­ity TV shows seem to lose their fresh­ness once aired, I decided to remove them from the list as I assumed the demand for such show on VOD would prob­a­bly be lim­ited over time. All this clean­ing up allowed me to for­mat a list of the top TV series which I could then use for research.

Because TV sea­sons change in the mid­dle of the year, I’ve looked to include sea­sons that ended in 2010 and sea­sons that started in 2010. If only one set is avail­able, this is noted in the table. If both sea­sons are avail­able, I put in Yes.

I picked Net­flix and Hulu as the first two ser­vices to look at because they have posi­tioned them­selves as alter­na­tive ways to watch the shows. I also included data from Ama­zon VOD, and iTunes as both of them are try­ing to sell either sea­son pass or per show pur­chas­ing to their users. I did not include the indi­vid­ual station’s web­sites sites (eg. ABC.com, NBC.com, CBS.com, Fox.com, etc…) because most of them are only acces­si­ble via com­put­ers and a high num­ber of them have started block­ing devices which were try­ing to offer access to their con­tent from a TV screen. For the same rea­son, I focused on Hulu Plus con­tent instead of the web-based one only.
It is impor­tant to note that TV episodes on Ama­zon and iTunes are avail­able in dif­fer­ent for­mats, either on a season-pass basis, per episode rental, or per episode purchase.

I’ve capped the list at 50 titles because, from a trend stand­point, the data seem to be roughly the same at top 50 and top 75.

The list

So with­out fur­ther ado, here’s the list of top 2010 TV shows avail­able for stream­ing on the internet:

Let’s total this up to see how the dif­fer­ent ser­vices did:

One of the first inter­est­ing trends to notice is that Hulu Plus seems to offer more recent episodes when it does but Net­flix seems to offer older ones that are not avail­able on Hulu. Often­times, the two offer dif­fer­ent selec­tion on the same show, allow­ing users with sub­scrip­tions to both ser­vices to get wider cov­er­age. Yet, Hulu only offers a bit over one third of all the big rat­ing get­ters last year and Net­flix offers only one out of five of those series on a par­tial basis.

Cur­rent sea­sons seem to be a strength area for Hulu Plus and a sub­stan­tial weak­ness for Net­flix. This may be of some sig­nif­i­cance as far as the cord-cutter trend is con­cerned. A ques­tion one could pose here is whether cord-cutters want fresh con­tent or not. If the lat­ter is the case, then Net­flix may pro­vide enough. On the other hand, if cord-cutter expect to be able to get rel­a­tively recent shows on their TV, they will either have to check the Hulu Plus list­ing or pur­chase the episodes on an indi­vid­ual basis.

Another inter­est­ing note is that while many episodes are avail­able for rent on iTunes and for sale on Ama­zon, the price dif­fer­ence tends to be pretty sub­stan­tial with Ama­zon sell­ing rights to own for $.99 per episode while Apple charges the same amount for the right to rent (they tend to charge $2.99 per episode for the right to own).

Break­ing it down

If you want some of the series (let’s say one sea­son but not the other), here’s what the data looks like:

… but if you want full cov­er­age (ie. both the 2009 sea­son that ended in 2010 and the 2010 sea­son that bleeds into 2011), the data looks as follows:

Con­clu­sion

Look­ing at the total num­bers, the sub­scrip­tion model offered by Net­flix and Hulu Plus seem to offer a rel­a­tively slim selec­tion. How­ever, the costs asso­ci­ated with pur­chas­ing sea­son pass for every show one fol­lows could get pro­hib­i­tive (in the research, it appeared that shows aver­aged between $30 and $60 for a sea­son pass).

All told, the Video On Demand ser­vices appear to have room for improve­ment. While Apple has an early lead in terms of over­all cov­er­age, its iTunes store is also the more expen­sive one, giv­ing Ama­zon an oppor­tu­nity to expand its foot­print by sell­ing titles at a lower price. In terms of avail­abil­ity, how­ever, Apple seems to hold a very solid lead over its competitors.

The sub­scrip­tion model offered by Hulu Plus and Net­flix, how­ever, still have a long way to go if they are aim­ing to truly be disruptors.