Market fragmentation in Video-on-Demand Services in the EU28

The main objective of the present study is to measure the extent of market segmentation for video-on-demand (VoD) services in the EU. We examine access to VoD catalogues in other countries and compare the content of film catalogue available across countries. Using various sources of data on VoD services we find that cross-border access to VoD services in the EU28 is extremely limited at 1.9% of available VoD services in the EU. Cross-border availability of film titles reaches 16.8%. Netflix performs better with 31% cross-border availability. Cross-border availability in VoD catalogues remains far below the 40% availability observed in digital film downloads, 80% in digital music downloads and 93% in e-books catalogues. Even within EU Member States, the VoD market is very fragmented with catalogue overlaps between local VoD providers in the order of 30-50% only. Consumers incur high switching costs to access a wider variety of products in this segmented market.

Authors:

ALAVERAS Georgios, GOMEZ HERRERA Maria Estrella, MARTENS Bertin