The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency will publish the “2024 Online Video Service Usage Survey” report on the 20th, which analyzes the public’s usage patterns of online video services (OTT).
Conducted for the second time following last year, the survey was carried out to understand the public’s usage patterns of OTT platforms and content. Face-to-face interviews were conducted over eight weeks starting on June 27th with 5,033 people aged 10 and over nationwide.
Over the past year, 89.3% of the public used both paid and free OTT platforms, with an average of 2.2 subscriptions per person, reflecting a 2.7 percentage point increase in usage compared to the previous year. While 53.4% of the public used paid OTT platforms, which decreased by 1.8 percentage points from last year, the use of free OTT platforms increased by 6.9 percentage points, with 85.1% of the public using them. YouTube was the most used platform at 84.9%, followed by Netflix (44.4%), TVING (17.0%), Coupang Play (14.8%), Disney+ (10.1%), and Wavve (6.9%) for paid OTT platforms.
Although the overall usage rate of OTT platforms, including free (ad-based) services, far surpasses that of paid OTT platforms, the average usage time for paid OTT platforms is significantly longer than the overall average. The average usage time for all OTT users was 98 minutes on weekdays and 116 minutes on weekends, while paid OTT users reported using them for 109 minutes on weekdays and 137 minutes on weekends, indicating that paid OTT users spend 11 more minutes on weekdays and 21 more minutes on weekends compared to overall OTT users.
The decline in the usage rate of paid OTT platforms is also reflected in the decrease in monthly subscription fees. The average monthly expenditure of paid OTT platform users (including multiple users) was 10,500 KRW, which is about 1,500 KRW less than the previous year. The willingness to pay the maximum monthly amount for multiple OTT service use was 15,191 KRW, a decrease of approximately 800 KRW from the previous year. The appropriate subscription fee per platform, according to paid OTT users, was 7,294 KRW, about 300 KRW higher than the previous year. This suggests that respondents have been influenced by the subscription fee hikes of major OTT platforms.
It was found that 24.6% of Netflix and TVING users are using an ad-supported plan, with 85.2% of them intending to maintain it. The proportion of responses citing “discount benefits/promotions offered” as a reason for subscribing to OTT services increased by 5.9 percentage points from the previous year. This indicates a demand for relatively less expensive ad-supported and discounted/bundled subscription plans.
Based on the survey results, the Korea Creative Content Agency intends to continuously make efforts to understand online video service content industry trends and formulate promotional policies.