TV audiences need more than recommendations; they need reasons to watch

As the industry’s major streaming services start to embrace the premise of bundling, they’re seeking to ward off churn while shoring up their audiences—oftentimes by teaming up with formerly bitter competitors. Yet while bundles will help consumers spend less than if they bought individual services à la carte, they can’t help viewers find something to watch or keep them engaged once they’ve tuned in.

It’s true that cost remains the biggest consideration that audiences weigh as they take stock of their streaming services amid content proliferation and recent price hikes. But as viewers continue to increase their time with streaming services and the content they offer, they’re becoming increasingly focused on the satisfaction they get for what they spend.

The problem isn’t, however, a short supply of programming. Audiences have more video titles available to them than they could ever watch in a single lifetime. In the U.S. alone, viewers had nearly 1.2 million titles to choose from at the start of 2024, with just over 85% available on streaming services.

The problem is that with so much content, a growing abundance of services and no program schedules, audiences are overwhelmed and rarely know what they want to watch when they tune in. 

According to Nielsen’s 2023 U.S. Streaming Consumer survey, 74% of streaming consumers either don’t know what they want to watch or only have a vague idea of what they want to watch when they start a streaming session. That means they either try something and hope for the best or spend too much time searching.

In many ways, the abundance of riches in a truly on-demand landscape has left audiences without a roadmap to what they’re looking for. And that will become a factor when audiences review which services they want to keep paying for.  

Ultimately, viewers equate satisfaction with price, especially when times are tight. So, without a roadmap to the content they’re looking for and service satisfaction in question, it’s not surprising that consumers are cutting back: a recent Forbes and OnePoll survey found that 45% of consumers have canceled a service within the last year because of the cost, and Deloitte’s 2024 Digital Media Trends survey found that 40% had canceled a service in the last six months.

Cost will always be a factor, but today’s streaming offerings are no longer limited to those that cost money (e.g., FAST¹). And many content licensing deals are no longer focused on exclusive arrangements with individual service providers. In June 2024, for example, viewers could watch episodes of Young Sheldon on Max, Netflix and Paramount+.

Given all that we know about the state of streaming, content discovery becomes the biggest factor in securing audiences and maintaining business longevity. Here’s why:

• Choice is abundant: The major services each offer hundreds of thousands of titles for viewers to choose from, and many aren’t exclusive.
• Churn is rampant: A recent Google study found that 48% of streaming subscribers have canceled a service because they couldn’t find something to watch.

The real issue straddles these two factors: Services aren’t meeting viewer needs. Despite the abundance of data about content and audiences, audiences say they’re not finding what they’re looking for. Recommendations are even missing the mark. Accenture’s 2024 Reinvent growth in the media industry report, for example, found that while 36% people struggle to find something entertaining to watch, 52% say that recommended content doesn’t match their interests.

While platforms and services can leverage granular metadata to develop audience-driven, viewer-specific recommendations to help consumers on their content journeys, they can also lean into products that do the heavy lifting for them. Gracenote Watch Prompts, for example, enhances the premise of a video tile within a video service by providing viewers with interesting facts, analogies and comparisons that take the guesswork out of content discovery journeys.

When paired with viewer preference and consumption data, informative snippets covering award wins, critical reviews, talent spotlights and pop-culture comparisons, time spent searching goes down and time spent watching content goes up—addressing the two primary factors affecting service satisfaction and churn.

For more information, read the press release announcing the launch of Watch Prompts and visit our Advanced Discovery page.

Note

1. FAST stands for free-ad supported television. Examples include the Roku Channel, Pluto TV and Tubi.