TVOD purchases see US spike in April

Trolls World Tour

April was the peak for transactional video on demand (TVOD) purchases in the US, with consumption dropping off in May.

According to new stats from Comscore, TVOD has seen a continued year-over-year increase during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but May’s decline compared to the previous month indicates that consumption may be returning to pre-pandemic levels.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the shelter-in-place orders that have been issued by many US states, sports and fitness proved to be the biggest categories with 232% and 486% growth through April 2020 as the nation looked to remain active. Sports was one of the few to continue its growth through to May, with a year-over-year increase of 925% for the category.

Life and home TVOD content also saw a significant growth of 96.35% in April, even increasing marginally in May.

Kids TVOD content saw a year-over-year decline of between 9-20% in the first three months of the year, only seeing 1.13% year-over-year improvement in April before dropping by 4.52% in May. This may be due to the high-profile launch of Disney+ in November 2019, with the streamer having a focus on the company’s enormous library of family-friendly content.

TVOD movie consumption saw 42.45% year-over-year growth in April, indicating that the strategy of major film distributors such as Universal to shift a number of their cinematic releases such as Invisible Man and Trolls World Tour to the small screen has paid off.

This report echoes a similar study from Strategy Analytics which showed a ‘pandemic peak’ in April for the viewership of Netflix.