Earlier this week I commented on the rumors that Apple might product original video content. Here’s another reason why our favorite tech company might want to do just that: the online digital video market is growing rapidly. As the accompanying chart, based on data from Statista’s Digital Market Outlook, illustrates, the growth potential in online video is much bigger than it is in digital music.
Annual revenues from video streaming and downloads are expected to grow by more than US$6 billion between 2014 and 2020 – almost four times the expected growth of the digital music market. Considering that subscription-based streaming is the primary growth driver in the online video market, it would make sense for Apple to get into the game before Netflix, Amazon and Hulu can run away with the market.
Digital video is defined as premium over-the-top Video-on-Demand (VoD) content, distributed over the Internet. This includes three fee-based business models: rentals as a single transaction or pay-per-view (transactional-VoD or TVoD); rentals as subscription-based services (subscription-VoD or SVoD) ; and digital purchases via download or permanent cloud-storage (electronic-sell-through or EST). Ad-supported content and services as well as amateur video contents aren’t included.
