The online space in just about any industry is limitless. Without walls or land limits to fit all of the potential businesses into, any entrepreneur can come along, set up shop, and level a challenge to even the biggest brands. It creates a supremely competitive space, particularly in luxury arenas, like entertainment.
People want entertainment, but with a wealth of options constantly being marketed to the public, to convince any given customer to come, enjoy, and stick around is a tall order. Even the seemingly unseatable goliaths need to up their game. Right now, we’re seeing a couple of key manoeuvres being leveraged by a few to keep ahead.
Lowering the Bar for Entry
It’s not uncommon to click on a business site and to soon be met by an offer of some kind. Often in the form of an overlay rather than a pop-up, you’ll get five, ten, or even 20 per cent off of our first purchase. If you check out Paddy Power’s bingo bonus, you’ll see that welcome offers have been joined by sessions of free play.
New players get 40 free spins after playing £10. From there, users can play bingo without cost. There are six hours of these open bingo sessions, meaning that, if someone fancies playing bingo online between 12pm and 6pm, they can do so for free and for cash prizes on the platform.
It’s a big selling point and one that shows the level of competition in play even within this relatively niche corner of online entertainment. Streaming services are seeing a similar uptick with their free offers. These need to be ad-supported to function, but it’s been found by The Media Leader that ad tiers have seen a 37 per cent uptick.
Creating Urgency with Live Action
Much of the online entertainment space rose to prominence by being more or less static. If anything is enjoyed in real time, it’s within the bounds of a set digital product that users can interact with. That is, of course, apart from live streaming offerings. What was once a niche or low-quality way of tuning into events is now mainstream.
Major entertainment platforms are catching onto this. One of the biggest names to integrate this into their platform has been Netflix. Riddled with issues from the outset, the biggest streamer in the world now looks to have nailed the formula with regular live streams of everything from sports to awards shows.
Streaming something live creates a sense of urgency and a need to tune in. While Netflix made its name on creating a way to endlessly watch episodes of TV back-to-back with minimum effort at your convenience, now the platform wants your attention at set times. The live shows mean that you need to be there at that time and nowhere else.
This angle has spawned many new creations. Some entertainment providers live stream physical products to the internet, such as with live roulette. In other cases, platforms dedicated to streaming live have risen to the fore. DAZN is an all-in live sports streaming platform, offering users subscription access and pay-per-view events. It had over 20 million subscribers as of 2023.
Offering free access or access to live content has become a major selling point in the war for our attention in online entertainment. Already, businesses are leveraging this rather well, which likely means that up-and-comers will soon need to find a new angle of competition to leverage.
