• by Wayne Friedman , April 8, 2014

Video-on-demand viewing continues to climb -- especially for TV programming.

Programming from broadcast and cable networks had a 17% increase in time spent viewing in 2013 over the previous year, according to a new Rentrak report on VOD.

Rentrak says total time spent viewing all VOD content -- free-on-demand, subscription-on-demand and transactional-on-demand -- was up 3% to 4.4 billion hours from the previous year.

The total time spent viewing free-on-demand television content for broadcast prime-time programming showed a 24% hike over the previous year.

The report also says that 66% of broadcast prime-time program and cable network programming viewing occurred after the third day of its original airing, which Rentrak believes will provide millions of additional advertising dollars for VOD.

TV networks looking to expand their efforts to get paid from marketers beyond three days of time-shifting, particularly through seven days of viewing.

Rentrak says buying movies on demand pulled in $1.5 billion in 2013, and that an average of 43.3 million televisions accessed VOD content with almost nine hours of time spent viewing per month.

"Watching TV" photo from Shutterstock.