ARA Research

During the development era of technology, many inventions were made to support the entertaining field for mankind as entertainment is also important for the existence of the humanity. One of the biggest inventions in the 21 century is the streaming service. Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The highlight of the streaming media is the streaming services – An online provider of entertainment (music, movies, etc.) that delivers content via an Internet connection to the subscriber’s computer, TV or mobile devices. There are 5 huge streaming companies: Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, and our main target is Netflix and Amazon Prime as they are two biggest players in this field. By considering many reliable sources, during this research I will analyze the question: “How did streaming services become successful among young adults in the past 10 year?”. I am also going to answer these sub-questions in order to provide the best outcome for this research:

1. What are the marketing plans of these companies?

2. What do these services have in common?

3. How did these streaming services highlight themselves from the other competitors (Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc.)?

Table 1: Comparison of 4 sample companies’ marketing plans

Each company has a different marketing method. Furthermore, they have different target group which explains why there are separate promotions plan. Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO are currently three top players in this industry. However, Amazon Prime Video is a smaller part of the whole Amazon Prime subscription (customer can buy the whole subscription or only Amazon Prime Video with a lower price). HBO stands out with many signature TV shows.

(MarketLine, 2014) shows the method Netflix used to provide the best services to their customer and make them stand out of the market as they and similar companies have changed the way a person would consume a TV shows – from waiting for the set schedule to “binge watching”. Netflix also made a huge investment in original content to provide the best products to their subscribers such as “House of Cards”, “Orange is The New Black”.

(Broderick, 2019) mentions Amazon Prime Video as a “new revenue streams for Amazon, attracting customers to their retail empire”. Amazon Prime Video first launched as “UnBox” in 2006 and raised popularity only after 2011 with a huge collection with a variety of products for customers. However, their CEO Jeff Bezos stated that “these forms of entertainment consumption as simply a ploy to add value towards the Amazon Prime subscription model”. Amazon Prime Video connects with many third-party channels such as HBO, Showtime and Cinemax to attract more customer to subscribe.

(Bhasin, 2019) has described the Marketing Mix of HBO and mentioned that “HBO has started showing latest blockbuster from Hollywood to increase its viewership”. Their contents are interesting and appealing to their customers, and they used many captivating slogans to raise their brand awareness such as “Its not TV, Its HBO” and have their advertisement printed on various famous magazine with enormou0s amount of readers. HBO also uses social media to promote themselves and create a huge impact on every potential customer.

(IZEA, 2019) explains a different marketing strategy of Hulu when describing their plan as “paid off in a big way”. Hulu sets various campaigns which involved many influencers in order to attract audience. The Sellout campaign was a success as Hulu managed to get the trust from their audience. By having all influencers announce that their main motive of their involvement is money, Hulu surprised their audience with a transparent truth, which definitely has gained their credit.

All these four companies have different approach to attract their customers. However, HBO has another target group which makes them stand out and highlight themselves among the Americans and the world, and Hulu has an odd advertising method. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and HBO are among the top players while Hulu positions themselves at the 9th (according to Inplayer).

Table 2: Compare the differences articles about these 4 companies

All three articles have Netflix as one of the comparing factors, and they all consider Netflix as one of the leading players in this field with excellent performance.

According to (Wenzel, Peter; Mahle, Irene; Pätzmann, Jens U, 2016), Netflix seems to handle their service better than Amazon as they “conducts its service in a consistent and sophisticated manner correlating with its brand intention to provide smart, convenient and easy service to the customer”. Netflix really does make themselves stand out of their rivals by their excellent services. Meanwhile, Amazon still follow their core value as they achieve their high customer involvement by a low pricing concept and they also offer additional features which Netflix does not provide.

(Clark, 2019) compares all targeted companies (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, Hulu) and provides readers with a thoroughly conclusion. The author mentions HBO as highest cost, Amazon Prime Video as highest range of products. However, when it comes to quality, the better shows and movies are all on Netflix, which means Amazon Prime Video is having a quantity over quality strategy in content. Netflix has the most original content of every platforms, but also the second most expensive (only after HBO). Hulu is an acceptable choice as they provide good services and products, and they’re without advertising plan is still cheaper than Netflix’s most popular plan. Amazon Prime Video is the best option for customers who is looking for the biggest libraries with an acceptable price.

(Clampitt, 2019) mentioned the scores of Netflix and Hulu when being compared by many criteria. Netflix proved themselves to be better than Hulu at almost every factor, and left Hulu far behind with a result of 217 (Hulu scores 91 and is labelled as “ineffective”). The author also explain clearly why Hulu was considered “ineffective” when pointing out their inability to communicate with users on many social media platforms and their contents are not actually focused on the customers. However, Hulu is still effective at “capturing some of television’s greatest moments” and highly successful in targeting the right audience at the right time with the right advertisements.

All four companies are rushing at providing customers with the best content and service, and the leading player will be the one who capable of handling these factors best.

Table 3: Compare the method of these companies which highlighted them.

According to (MarketLine, 2018), Netflix highlights their service by creating explicit content. They invested a large amount of money in producing high quality and original content in order to attract customers. Netflix is dominating the market with many strategic partnerships and expanding dramatically on a global scale. Netflix CFO David Wells announced that by the end of 2018, the company aims to have more than 700 original TV series and 80 will be non-English in order to globalized and connect to every audience around the world.

(Wenzel, Peter; Mahle, Irene; Pätzmann, Jens U, 2016) mentioned that Amazon has a different approach. Their main purpose is different from Netflix as they want to attract customers into their whole subscription plan of Amazon Prime. Although their market share does not seem to be impressive, their advertisement revenue went up 123% last year alone as their most important feature is the rapidly growing advertising segment. They also produce many side hardware to give their customers the best experience and create a whole new ecosystem.

Meanwhile, according to (Teknicks, 2013) HBO has various interesting online marketing plans. They use many cutting-edge technologies, which is reasonable in this modern digital era. However, the SEO (search engine optimization) strategy still remains traditional while using many advanced tools as it would likely to be the safest method when Google keep changing the algorithm. HBO pushes the boundary only when it comes to SEM (search engine marketing) as there are various opportunity in this field and develop their brand image on every social media platform to have the highest reach ability to the potential customers. HBO is one of the biggest player in the industry, and they have a really high spending power as not only did they make a website and sell goods for American Vampire League , Fellowship of the Sun but also promote and produce the Tru Blood drink (for the series True Blood).

After analyzing all the sources from many perspectives, the method these big companies in this industry used to attract their customer and raise the brand awareness in order to develop drastically in this entertaining era is clear. The first success platform was Netflix, and then emerged Amazon Prime, Hulu and HBO also. Beside from these interesting features like watch on different screens at ultra HD (Netflix), these companies also develop good brand awareness toward customers. With the subscriptions in order to unlock unlimited features and an ad-free model, there is no doubt why the industry is growing stronger and stronger day by day. Furthermore, with different marketing plans that all offer a wide range of content, the movie streaming model is becoming more and more successful. There are different strategies to earn the trust from the subscribers for Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Hulu, but to HBO – the real enormous player from the USA, they can implement better and bigger plans in which leads to more revenue for the company. Netflix and Amazon Prime can be seen as two huge players competing against each other for the top position in this field, but they are still partner according to (Wenzel, Peter; Mahle, Irene; Pätzmann, Jens U, 2016). In conclusion, all these companies have different strategies and are all competing for the top positions in this industry and making customer hard to choose the ideal application when they want to subscribe for some “binge watching”.

It took me a really long time to complete this research as I have to read sources from many links, and there were even time when there was a link that I doubt its credibility and had to give up all the information from that article. After writing this report and apply the CARS method, I feel more advanced whenever I need to find information about some random subjects. Doing research makes me to start from the number zero and build up every pieces of information from many articles that I have found and checked credibility. I acknowledged myself more about the streaming industry in total and Netflix in particular (as I am very interested in Netflix after the quarantine period). I chose the subject just because I was interested in Netflix, but then I want to do research about how the other companies are doing and how did they gain their position in this field. I consulted every single source with an objective point of view and tried my best to have no biases for any company, even Netflix itself. At first when doing the research, I did have a cognitive bias for Netflix as I am a customer of Netflix as well. After having carefully read the sources about other companies, I decided that the main focus here is to answer the questions in the most objective way and tried my best to not in favor of any companies. Last but not least, all my conclusions and comments were not affected by my biases as I have analyzed many sources before making the final statement in order to be certain about my reasonableness of the research.

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