How to Convert Serial OTT Churners Into Long-Haul Subscribers
Single-show drop-ins who subscribe and churn in short order are the bane of subscription-based streaming services. In this clip from Streaming Media Connect, Philo Head of Product Marketing Steven Chang, Horse & Country President David Guinan, and Chris Pfaff Tech Media CEO Chris Pfaff discuss some tried-and-true or newly emerging strategies services can deploy to keep fair-weather fans in the fold.
How Philo Addresses Onboarding and Churn
"There's always a lot of hand-wringing when it comes to particularly big brands, but also with independents," Pfaff begins, referencing the persistent churn anxiety that afflicts subscription-based streamers of all sizes. "We see these things with major releases that drive massive signups, then subscribers cancel as soon as the season finale ends. What do you see as specific onboarding workflows or discovery tactics that prove most effective at converting this sort of single show drop-in into the multi-show subscriber?"
"In terms of how we address onboarding and churn when it comes to these seasonal events, I think it might be worthwhile from our perspective at Philo to take one step back," Chang replies. "We tend to approach retention and churn in a segmented fashion. When we start to get into the one-size-fits-all approaches, that's where we see the returns dwindle. Most users come to Philo for one of two reasons. One is they're looking for a cable replacement, and in that case, they're looking more for a service. And in the second case, people are coming for season premieres of shows, seasonal events, and things like that. And our approach for each of those types of users is a little bit different. For the users coming in for a cable replacement, we typically want to get them to adopt our highest-retention features such as DVR, profile-sharing, things like that. When it comes to users who come in for a specific show, of course, our main goal is to get a user to watch a second show. It's not rocket science, but it's definitely a little bit trickier [done] than said. So the key there is, through a series of discovery recommendations, both in-app and out-of-app, via email and push notifications, we've seen, through analysis, the LTV [lifetime value] of our users who watch one show versus two shows. And then, as you can imagine, three, four, et cetera shows, the LTV just increases pretty expectedly."
Making Fandom Frictionless
Horse & Country's Guinan, acknolwedging that it's not his first rodeo in the streaming world, cautions that when it comes to applying different types of onboarding and retention strategies, "it's important to differentiate between linear content, VOD content, and live sports, which is what we are, and they're completely different games. The idea of how to get people to tune into a new episode of Severance or something like that is not what I play. But with live sport, in a weird way, it's easier because, it's one of the real reasons that appointment viewing still exists. So the chances are people will find you, and it really is about making it frictionless to identify fans out there and really reach and provide the best product for your core audience."
He goes on to say that at Horse & Country, "organic still typically leads our acquisition funnel followed by performance." At the Cowboy Channel, he recalls, "we employed strategies like giving away a free rodeo of the week. To quote Oscar Wilde, 'Genius steals.' So I borrow from what I see work on other platforms like Major League Baseball doing a free game of the day. But we'd take it a step further where we would put a portion of some live events on Facebook Live and then make the pathway to sign up and register a hell of a lot easier and then keep treating those free users with respect, giving them a knowledge pool of how to enjoy the sport, what's happening, and then eventually start offering them incentives to convert."
Keeping Rodeo Fans in the Saddle
Describing Cowboy Channel as "one of the great passion-play channels," Pfaff says, "I would think that you'd be able to retain people pretty well, given that you super-serve people in the rodeo space, right?"
"It's pretty funny you say that, because rodeo's an interesting sport. Before Cowboy Channel came along, there was one large event that everybody watches in rodeo called the National Finals Rodeo [NFR], which is 10 days, [starting the] first Thursday in December in Las Vegas. Before that, people would typically go to a rodeo like Cheyenne or Deadwood because they live there. It's like a county fair, and there'd also be a rodeo. But it was very, very hard to follow the sport because the athletes take a circuitous route. They follow money. So it's not like a PGA tour where you have the same people qualifying for each one. I mean, they're not like 700-800 rodeos. So people will take all of these weird tours, sometimes going 24,000 miles with a horse over the course of the season, which is quite long. I mean, we're talking January to the end of September. By showing them all and having a really, really good editorial staff that were clipping every ride and showing what the narrative is, we were able to consolidate it and let people actually follow the sport for the first time. But even doing that, 40% of our audience would just watch the NFR and then nothing else."
Guinan then asks and answers the key retention question there: "What you do with a situation like that? You make it only available for annuals."
Join us November 9–11, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
Related Articles
Streaming Media Connect returned this week with six dynamic keynotes from NASA+, Google, TiVo, BallySports, Wowza, and TwelveLabs, and peak-form panels on refining your live streaming playbook, tuning latency, matching ads to content, scaling streaming architecture, curbing churn, leveraging AI in personalized content discovery, innovating streaming UX, optimizing QoS and QoE, and a timely dissection of Disney's 4K EU blackout.
14 Aug 2026
On Thursday, Aug. 13, Roku's Nicole Fencel, Philo's Steven Chang, Women in Streaming Media's Deepali Narsiker, and Horse & Country's David Guinan will join Chris Pfaff for the Streaming Media Connect panel "The Retention Game: Managing Subscriber Acquisition and Churn." Join this closing panel for a candid discussion on which subscriber acquisition and retention strategies work in 2026 and which ones fail to move the needle. Learn how leading streaming platforms are drawing on data science insights and leveraging personalization to turn one-show drop-ins into long-term, loyal subscribers.
14 Jul 2026