The last time I wrote a note about our membership numbers, it was early March, right after the end of Black History Month, and indeed OVID enjoyed a nice uptick in sign-ups throughout February. Unfortunately, many good things come to an end, and it seems like a higher than usual percentage of those new people then canceled their subscriptions in March.

An update on OVID’s membership (subscriber) growth through February 2021… The last time we posted this chart, we showed our member statistics with figures through the end of 2020. While the numbers were still increasing at the time, they were doing so quite slowly and were likely to flatten out soon because the “top level” number (of users including free trials) had not moved for several weeks.

Two of the metrics that we look at to see how well OVID is doing—to get a sense of whether we’re moving in the right direction, or have a chance of surviving—are Conversions and Churn. This information is generally closely held in the SVOD business. In fact, we are not aware of any other streaming service which has released this data.

One of the founding principles of OVID is a commitment to openness and transparency. For any number of reasons we believe that it is high-time for the film and media industries to open the books and share with both our members (subscribers, customers, viewers) and our filmmaking, producing, and distribution partners, the real numbers and metrics and dollars and cents of the business. We’d be happy to enter into a discussion with our colleagues, distributors, and other VOD and SVOD services about this idea and why information such as that shown here is generally so closely held.

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