How Jobs-to-be-Done Thinking can Change the Way Streaming Brands Grow
Media brands cannot win the content arms race on budget alone. Jobs-to-be-Done and Switching Forces can reveal what audiences are really trying to do when they choose what to watch, and what makes them take up a new service and make it part of the regular viewing.
For media brands, the content arms race has a ceiling. There is always a service with a deeper catalogue or a bigger launch, and competing on volume alone is a race almost everyone loses. Even the biggest spenders are fighting for the same finite hours of attention and budgets as everyone else. The more useful question, and the one that does not depend on the largest budget, is what audiences are actually trying to do when they choose what to watch, and what makes them take up a new service and keep using it.
That question cuts across the market whatever the business model or value proposition. Subscription streaming services live or die on winning paying members and keeping them past the first month. Free, ad-funded services like Tubi remove the price barrier entirely and monetise attention instead. Hybrid players like ITVX and Channel 4 run both at once, free ad-funded viewing alongside paid ad-free tiers, serving two value propositions from a single product. Different models, different value propositions, but they all have the same route to growth: understanding what audiences value (for example,. removing effort and frustration in content discovery, or providing nostalgia and comfort after a hard day), so they can win new viewers and keep the ones you have. This is where Jobs-to-be-Done thinking can help by surface how to win and keep audiences based on what matters most to them.
Focus on the Job, Not just the content
JTBD starts from a premise that sounds obvious but rarely guides content or product strategy in the streaming space: people do not choose a service for its features, or even its content library. They hire it to get something done. A viewer settling down in the evening is not asking for a longer list of channels or another row of thumbnails. The job is to land on something that fits their mood and situation, in the time they have, without a struggle and within their budget. Uncover the underlying JTBD and you learn what audiences are really seeking, in a way that endures while features and content slates date.
Once you understand the job, what you are offering shifts, not just how you talk about it. The product is not the catalogue. It is the whole relationship: how easily someone finds something worth watching, how the service fits the rhythm of their evening, how well it fits viewing situations (couples, families, solo viewing), whether it shows you what you like or puts a long list of irrelevant content in your way. Those are the levers. You stop asking how to get people to watch more, and start asking the more useful question: what is this viewer trying to achieve, and where are we helping them get there, or getting in their way?
The Forces Behind Taking Up a New Streaming Service
Knowing the job is not enough. Something has to move a viewer to take up a new service, and something often holds them back. Switching Forces maps four discrete forces of change. Two drive change: push, the dissatisfaction with what they have now, and pull, the attraction of something better. Two resist it: habit, the gravity of the default and the familiar, and anxiety, the nagging doubts about whether this is worth it, whether they will actually use it, and whether it is worth the effort of switching. For a viewer to act, push and pull have to outweigh habit and anxiety.
Most media marketing pours its energy into pull: better trailers, bigger launches, more content. Habit and anxiety go unaddressed, and that is usually where the real barrier sits. For a subscription streaming services, strong push factors and weak habits surface as churn, the member who feels frustrated or has never built the service into their week and cancels after a month. Remove the price entirely, as a free service like Tubi does, and you might expect the barrier to vanish, but it simply moves. With no money at stake the question is no longer whether it is worth paying for, but whether it is worth the viewer's time, interruptions to content viewing through ads and a place on their home screen. Providing Pulls alone and neglecting the other three forces in product strategy and communications planning rarely beats the inertia created by the strong bonds and habitual behaviour linked to the apps and content a viewer goes to by default.
From Audience Value to Business Value
There is a complication that runs deep for any media brand: the value their audiences seek and the value those same audiences present to the business often pull in opposite directions. Revenue rarely comes straight from the viewer, advertising demand rises and falls regardless of how the service performs, and, counterintuitively, a light viewer can be worth more than a heavy one, because the harder someone is to reach anywhere else, the more an advertiser will pay to reach them through the streamer.
This is sharpest for hybrid models such as ITVX and Channel 4 both run free ad-funded viewing alongside paid ad-free tiers, which means the same viewer can be worth very different things depending on which side of the proposition they sit, and the most engaged viewer is not always the most valuable one. Getting this wrong means optimising for the wrong audience entirely.
Choosing the Right Method
Ask viewers why they chose a service and they will tell you about price or a particular show. True enough, but it is the tidy version. The real decision is made in the moment, on the sofa, shaped by mood, effort, who else is in the room and what is already easiest to reach, and audiences are poor at articulating these forces afterwards.
That is why method matters. Recall-based surveys miss the in-the-moment trade-offs, so we start closer to the decision: switching diaries that capture choices as they happen, and moderated exploratory qualitative research to explore their choices. The resulting Jobs to be Done are then quantified and prioritised at scale via surveys, with trade-off modelling such as MaxDiff, which establishes which jobs genuinely move behaviour rather than which ones merely sound important. Segmentation built on jobs rather than demographics, attitudes or behaviour shows who shares which needs, and personas carrying each segment's jobs, switching forces and proposition fit turn the analysis into something product, UX and marketing teams can actually use.
Making It Real
Jobs to be Done only earns its place if it produces something you can act on: an honest view of what audiences are trying to achieve, where the current experience is letting them down, and what would genuinely change their behaviour. Across subscription, free and hybrid models, the brands that grow are rarely the ones with the most content. They are the ones that understand the job their audience is hiring them for, address the forces that hold viewers back, and build that understanding into the product, the roadmap and the way they measure success. That is the difference between interesting findings and a viewing experience audiences truly value and return to each evening.
Example streaming media case study:
TV Jobs to be Done & Audience Segmentation
We partnered with ITV to develop two integrated segmentation solutions, created to drive product and marketing strategy for its video streaming service, ITVX. Our solution blended a customer-centric lens, using Jobs-to-be-Done data, with a commercial-based solution based on customer value. In-depth Personas were created from immersive qualitative research with the segments to build empathy and provide actionability.
