How Yabble's Virtual Audiences makes competitor intelligence quick, consistent, and genuinely interrogable — illustrated through an Australian streaming market analysis.
Competitor research tends to exist in one of two modes: the big annual deep dive that takes weeks and lands just as the market moves on, or the informal gut-check that happens in a Slack thread and gets forgotten. Neither gives strategy, marketing, or insights teams what they need — timely, consistent intelligence about how the market is shifting and what different customer segments think and feel about the brands in their space.
Yabble's Virtual Audiences helps to close that gap. To show what that looks like in practice, we ran a full competitor analysis of Australia's streaming market. Here is what the tool does, and what it found.
Input a research topic and within 15 minutes you have a market insights and trends report, synthesised from a wide range of sources and weighted towards the most recent data. For the Australian streaming analysis, that meant drawing on sources including Canstar, Deloitte, ACMA, IAB Australia, Worldpanel by Numerator, and EightX, among others.
For this market, the report surfaced a clear shift: Australia's streaming sector has moved from a growth story to a value story. Streaming is now the dominant viewing habit — 91% of adults use an online video service weekly and 68% use paid subscription services (6) — but subscriber growth is no longer the metric that matters. Subscribers are managing budgets, rotating services, and making deliberate trade-offs between price and access.
The specific forces shaping that behaviour came through clearly. Price increases are pushing subscribers toward cheaper plans rather than cancellation: average household spend fell from $52 in Q4 2025 to $49 in Q1 2026, and one in three new subscribers in Q1 2026 chose an ad-supported plan (3). Content events drive acquisition more reliably than library depth — 42% of new Australian subscribers in Q1 2026 said a single title was the main reason they signed up (3). Churn is normalising, with 44% of cancellations across subscription businesses occurring in the first 90 days (5). Telco bundling has become a structural retention mechanism, with Vodafone, Telstra and Optus all using streaming partnerships to reduce subscriber turnover (1).
Alongside the insights and trend reports, Virtual Audiences automatically generates a set of AI Personas — audience segments drawn directly from the research, each with a name, demographic profile, regional context, and a detailed behavioural picture.
The segments reflect the actual splits in the market data — between urban and regional, between sport-first and social-first, between the subscriber who churns in 30 days and the one who has not cancelled anything in years. Crucially, the same Persona set can be brought into new projects at a later date. When you run the same competitor analysis in six months using the same Personas, any shift in their responses reflects a genuine change in the market — not a change in sample, methodology, or the agency you happened to use. That consistency is what makes tracking over time meaningful rather than approximate.
Once the Personas exist, they can be interviewed. As many times as needed, at no additional cost after project creation. That transforms them from a research output into a standing insights assset — one that can be tested against any brief, any competitor move, any market shift, at any point.
For competitor research specifically, this opens up questions that traditional methods struggle to answer quickly: How do different segments feel about a brand, not just what they think? Where do perceptions diverge across the audience? What is driving loyalty or resentment in a specific segment?
For the streaming analysis, we ran a group interview with all eight Personas using projective techniques to surface emotional brand associations — asking segments to characterise brands as animals for example. Approaches like these are designed to reach past rational evaluation and surface the emotional character of a brand as different segments actually experience it.
The group view is useful for mapping the overall territory, but the more valuable step is following up with individual Persona interviews — targeting the segments where perceptions are most likely to diverge from the consensus, or where a specific strategic question needs a segment-specific answer.
One in three new Australian subscribers in Q1 2026 chose an ad-supported plan (3), which means a large and growing share of the subscriber base is experiencing these brands primarily through their ad tiers. Individual interviews with younger, budget-conscious segments showed that a poorly executed ad tier — repetitive ads, bad timing, non-skippable breaks — does not just frustrate; it changes how the brand is perceived. Ava 'Stacked Streamer' described the same service feeling "polished and worth recommending" on premium, but "transactional, budget-first, less special, and way more replaceable" on a poorly executed ad tier. For brands managing the transition to ad-supported models, that is a brand management problem, not just a product one.
An interview with Pat 'Multigen Sharer' revealed something the group discussion missed entirely. In a multi-generational home, Netflix's account-sharing policy had turned the service from a household default into the primary source of streaming-related conflict: "What used to feel like a flexible, family-friendly service now feels like it's policing us." The brand moved from default staple to rotating option — driven not by content quality but by a single policy change.
When asked which service they trusted most, the group pointed to ABC iview. Noah 'Ad-Pragmatist', interviewed individually, revealed that trust in this context had nothing to do with content quality or institutional reputation. It was about pricing behaviour: "A service can be high quality but still not feel trustworthy if it keeps getting pricier or harder to use." For 14% of Australians, reliable internet already costs more than 10% of household income, rising to 67% in the lowest-income quintile (12). In those segments, trust is a value-and-fairness concept. Brands that communicate as if it is a quality concept are speaking past them.
Zoe 'Regional Value Seeker' surfaced a dimension the group had skipped entirely: streaming reliability as a direct driver of brand perception. When a paid service buffers or makes offline downloads complicated, the trust damage is immediate and disproportionate to the incident. "I go from thinking, 'Yep, this is worth the money,' to 'Why am I paying for something that only works when everything's perfect?'" Free services carry no reliability expectation. Paid ones do — and in regional markets, that expectation gets tested regularly.
The group described Kayo as essential. Grace 'Sports Loyalist' added the emotional texture underneath: "It's less of a warm relationship and more of a 'can't live without you, but you're testing my patience' situation." Rights fragmentation across multiple services turns that frustration concrete — the experience is not more choice, it is more admin. The loyalty floor is high, but so is the ceiling on resentment, and they are moving toward each other as fragmentation and pricing pressure both increase.
With market reports and a set of Personas ready in 15 minutes, the group interview and individual follow-ups could be conducted immediately. This let us cover the full range of a traditional competitor research project in an afternoon: market context, segment profiles, emotional brand perception, and the divergences between segments that group-level data would have smoothed over.
The part that compounds is what comes next. The same Personas can be brought into a new project in six months and asked the same questions. When Grace's frustration with Kayo deepens, or Pat's relationship with Netflix shifts again, those changes are real market signals — not noise introduced by a different sample or a different methodology. The ability to keep interrogating the same segments, without limits and without spinning up a new research cycle each time, is what turns a one-off analysis into an ongoing intelligence capability.
The streaming market is one example. The same approach works wherever the competitive picture is moving faster than annual research can track — whether that is financial services watching new entrants reshape customer expectations, FMCG brands monitoring how different shopper segments are responding to private label, or a SaaS business trying to understand why a competitor's positioning is landing with one segment and not another. If your team needs to know not just what the market looks like today but how it is changing, and how different customers feel about the brands in it, Virtual Audiences was built for exactly that.
Want to see what Virtual Audiences can find out about your market?
→ See how it works — a closer look at the methodology
→ Book a demo — for teams ready to explore a specific category or brief
Each post in #AIonPoint: Market Insights for Brands explores the trends and consumer behaviors shaping your industry. From retail and CPG to tech, we’re uncovering what truly drives markets, all powered by our synthetic data solution that’s fast, accurate, and always on point. Stay tuned for more insights and trends as Yabble AI decodes consumer behavior, helping brands thrive in an ever-changing landscape.
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