Tracking aggregate metrics for streaming apps during content events can only provide so much info. You can see below this paragraph that daily active users increased significantly for these streamers who were showing the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs. The problem is there are lots of content events within the span of time the Finals took place, making it hard to attribute performance to a specific event.
This is why we pulled data directly from Apptopia’s US consumer device panel, enabling us to see disaggregated data. We created a custom cohort of devices that were active during the dates and times of the first four NBA Finals games to determine what percentage of streamers were New Users, what percentage were Resurrected Users, and what percentage of devices were already active.
Fubo [NYSE: FUBO] had the most surprising data, with a whopping 88.5% of its users during the Finals being classified as New. Our Downloads estimates do show a healthy spike in new users around the start of the games. Another 7.7% of Finals viewers counted as Resurrected, meaning only a small portion (3.9%) of Fubo’s Finals viewers were already active users of the app.
YouTube TV [NASDAQ: GOOGL] had almost half (47.1%) of its NBA Finals views counted as New, while it was only able to re-engage 7.1% of users. Peacock [NASDAQ: CMCSA] was able to re-engage the largest percentage of the group, with 13.6% of its Finals viewers being Resurrected. Its share of users that were New to the platform registered at 33.9%. ESPN [NYSE: DIS] counted 19.4% of its viewers as New and only was only able to draw 1.4% back in.
A New User is defined as one that has never had a session on the app prior to 8pm ET on June 3rd, the first game of the finals. A Resurrected User is one that had churned but then had a valid session during at least one NBA Final game. For this analysis, a valid session was one of at least 90 seconds. Churned users are those who did not have any activity on the app for at least 30 days prior to 8pm ET the night of the first game.
