New Delhi, Aug 23 (IANS): The global over-the-top (OTT) video market is expected to hit 4.2 billion users with an impressive 53 per cent penetration rate by 2027, a report showed on Wednesday.

Over the past five years, the number of users in the over-the-top video segment has jumped by 45 per cent, rising from 2.4 billion in 2018 to 3.5 billion in 2023, according to data presented by OnlyAccounts.io.

OTT has taken the video market by storm and will continue to grow in the future.

According to Statista Market Insights, in 2018, around 2.4 billion people worldwide used OTT video services. In the next two years, this figure jumped to over 3 billion.

The impressive user growth continued in 2021, with another 300 million people entering the market. 2022 saw an 82 million user drop, the first one in years, but the increasing trend continued in 2023.

Overall, more than one billion people worldwide started using OTT video services between 2018 and 2023, causing the user penetration in the market to jump from 33.2 per cent to 45.6 per cent in this period, the report mentioned.

Over the past five years, streaming giants have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on creating new content, all in a race to grow their viewership, pushing the total number of users in the OTT video market to record highs.

All the largest service providers in the market, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and Disney+, saw their subscriber count double and triple in the past five years, helping total market revenue to reach record highs.

In 2023, OTT video service providers are expected to gross nearly $295 billion in revenue or three times more than $98.7 billion reported in 2018.

Around 70 per cent of that value will come from the US, China and the UK, the top three markets.

OTT video advertising is the largest revenue stream in the market, generating $176.6 billion or nearly 60 per cent of total revenue this year.