15 May 2023 | Omar Oakes

‘Plenty of global SVOD growth left’ despite Disney+’s Indian bummer

IPL: Disney no longer holds sole broadcast rights (Picture: Jms1241, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

“There is still plenty of SVOD growth left”, global TV trends analysts have suggested amid forecasts that global subscriptions will increase by 400 million by 2028.

This comes despite entertainment giant Disney expected to continue losing subscriptions in India after losing sole rights to streaming the extremely popular IPL cricket matches on Disney+.

Global subscription video on demand (SVOD) subscriptions will increase by 24% between 2022 and 2028 to reach 1.76 billion, according to Digital TV Research.

Netflix is on course to remain the world’s biggest SVOD platform by number of subscribers (277 million) in five years’ time, closely followed by Amazon’s Prime Video (265 million).

Previous forecasts had predicted that Disney+ would overtake Netflix by 2027, but estimates for the Disney streaming service have been revised down significantly since last year. Having last Summer predicted Disney+ would reach 274 million subscribers by 2027, Digital TV Research forecasts Disney+ will reach 222 million subscribers by 2028.

Previous forecasts had assumed that Disney+ Hotstar would retain the sole India Premier League cricket rights for another five years. However, from this year, Viacom is offering free-to-view IPL matches on its JioCinema platform, which is having a severely negative impact on Disney+’s India SVOD numbers and the average revenue per user in India, a report by CLSA revealed over the weekend.

Six US-based platforms will have 972 million SVOD subscribers by 2028 (55% of the world’s total), up from 711 million in 2022. Much of this fast growth will come from the younger platforms completing their global rollouts.

By 2028, 24 countries will have more than 10 million SVOD subscriptions.

Simon Murray, principal analyst at Digital TV Research, said the forecast demonstrates that “there is still plenty of SVOD growth left.”

“Netflix will remain the largest platform despite Disney+ adding 57 million subscribers between 2022 and 2028. Netflix will add 46 million subscribers,” Murray added.