Study: OTT in Half of World’s Homes By 2020

Over-the-top video services will be available in 706.5 million TV homes worldwide by 2020, nearly double the 374.4 million homes expected in 2014, according to a report by Digital TV Research.

Asia will see the most growth – its report Global Online TV & Video Household Forecasts predicts that Asia Pacific will gain 233 million OTT homes between 2013 and 2020, about 61% of the global additions during the same period. The report stated that China alone will add 140 million OTT homes by 2020, taking its total to 206 million homes – more than all of Europe – and will overtake the U.S. in 2014.

By 2020, 47.6% of the world’s TV households will view online television and video, up from 15.4% in 2010, according to Digital TV Research. South Korea (79.8%) will have the highest proportion by country by 2020, with India (21.9%) at the other end of the scale.

Subscription video on demand subscribers should rise to 199 million by 2020, according to the report, more than double the 83 million expected by the end of 2014. North America’s share of the total will fall from 57% in 2014 to 34% in 2020. While that shows that most of the growth in OTT services will happen outside the U.S., America will still contribute 62 million homes to the 2020 total, with Japan in second place with 20 million homes.

Digital Research estimates that by 2020, 13.4% of the world’s TV households will subscribe to an SVOD package like Netflix or Amazon Prime, up from only 1.6% in 2010 and an expected 6.1% by year-end 2014. The proportion in 2020 will vary from 49.6% in the US and 48.5% in Sweden to 2% in India and Vietnam. Ten countries will have SVOD penetration in excess of one-third of TV households by 2020.