Digitizing VHS tapes and DVDs is happening at a much smaller scale relative to libraries’ purchasing and licensing approaches to addressing streaming media demands.Streaming media is a growing segment of the library materials budget, with its footprint projected to double over the next five years.The impact on instruction is the top factor driving academic library decision-making related to purchasing and renewing streaming licenses.Our key findings provide essential insight into how libraries’ streaming media strategies are evolving: The survey tracked the vendors libraries are most commonly working with, acquisition models and licensing agreements, current and projected budgets for streaming, and the digitization of physical media. In 2021, Ithaka S+R conducted a survey designed to provide insight into the streaming media strategies libraries are adopting and the challenges they are facing.

The survey was conducted as part of a unique partnership between Ithaka S+R and 24 academic libraries that are collaborating to explore how to advance streaming media strategy in libraries (see Appendix I).

Building on those data gathering efforts, this report shares findings from the most comprehensive survey to date of academic library streaming media approaches at four-year institutions in the US and Canada. To compound matters further, streaming media businesses focused on providing educational content are rapidly evolving due to mergers and acquisitions and the development of new business models among the sector’s dominant companies.Īs the urgency of these issues has grown, researchers have undertaken several important efforts to track how libraries are approaching the streaming media market and troubleshoot the challenges they are encountering, focusing especially on strategies for balancing patron demand with managing costs. Pricing models can make it difficult to fully meet patron demands, and some collections feature content that is not consistent with the library’s mission. University libraries purchase and license the bulk of this content intended for campus-wide (as opposed to personal) consumption and are facing numerous challenges associated with integrating streaming media into their collecting strategies. University instructors and students have a huge appetite for streaming media, and demand is growing apace as the format achieves mainstream market dominance over earlier technologies such as DVDs.

Reality capture educational license