As year 2021 comes to a close and our numbers have finalized, I thought I ought to sum up in one place the main quantifiable changes in key areas of OVID’s development, taking the opportunity to double-down on one of our founding principles: radical transparency.

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.

As we enter the new year, it seems appropriate that I report on aspects of how OVID is doing. I also want to point you in the direction of two interesting articles which I think contextualize what OVID is all about. First, we’ve updated our searchable Master List of Films on OVID. We added about 30 titles over the past two months—we took a break over the holidays—so as of December 31, 2020, we are now at 982 titles. Of course we do continue to add more films every week. We have 18 titles lined up for January, and will be sharing each coming month’s schedule here on metafilm.

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