Because there’s too much news relevant to the subscription industry to cover today, here’s a handy round-up of topics.
#1. HBO GO Partners with Amazon Prime to Offer Video Streaming
It looked like HBO GO was quietly looking to launch its own video streaming subscription site as it turned a blind eye to dual logins. But instead, the premium cable channel has chosen to partner with Amazon Prime to make a wide variety of its shows available to Prime subscribers.New and old series will be available in their entirety. In addition, HBO GO will become available on Amazon Fire TV later this year. Which is a very smart move for HBO — they get the audience and royalties, with the operating costs of maintaining a fast, streaming site for millions of users.This partnership is certain to benefit Amazon, too, as it competes with Netflix for offering original programming to its paying subscribers on-demand.
#2. Spotify Leaps to 10 Million Paying Subscribers, Estimated $1.2 Billion in Revenue
Music streaming subscription service Spotify announced that it has 10 million paying subscribers. Since individual subscriptions are $10/month, and assuming all subscribers are retained over the next year, Spotify is poised to garner $1.2 billion in subscription revenues this year.Spotify has a total of 40 million active users, which means it will gain additional revenue from advertising. However, the site is still not profitable. Music streaming is seen as one of the largest growing niches for digital subscription sales, but also has the hardest time converting those revenues into profits because of royalties and fees.
#3. Social Sign-Ons Declining Because of Consumer and Business Backlash
And finally, recent research shows that social sign-on (i.e., registering with a site using a social media account) may be on the decline and consumers express more anxiety about shared information and businesses get wary of social media giants.While social sign-ons can increase conversion rates for subscription sites trying to get a user to register, more and more consumers are worried that their online activity will be broadcast to their whole network or collected by businesses.Businesses are conflicted about the higher conversion rates and consumer concern. But they also face obscurity from social media giants, too. In a Wall Street Journal story, Macy asked Google to reveal the code it would use to track Google+ shoppers, but Google declined.As we recommended a year ago in our How-To on Social Media Sign-Ons, if you decide to use social sign-ons, you should always give consumers the option to login with an email and password of their own, like in the example below.
