Live TV, DVR Viewing Rises, Even As Pay TV Shrinks

Although pay TV homes are shrinking, TV viewing continues to climb.

Live TV viewing rose 7% in the fourth quarter of 2015 to 1,004 hours of TV viewed per household, with time-shifted viewing -- 15 days after live airing -- also gaining 7% to 356 hours of TV viewed per household, according to comScore’s TV Essentials.

“The availability of more viewing options appealing to a wide array of tastes, in addition to the continued expansion of premium original scripted programming on cable networks, has likely contributed to this effect,” according to a comScore report.

All this comes in the wake of Nielsen recently reporting a fourth-quarter 2015 drop in cable subscribers of 2.5% and a 1.7% decline among all pay TV providers -- cable, satellite and telco.

Also in the comScore report, cable network-based video-on-demand -- free on demand services -- earned a 61.7% share for the first nine months of 2015 when looking at all video on demand. This is up slightly from a 61.4% share through the first nine months of 2014.

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Cable network-based subscription video on demand services such as those from HBO and Showtime, are the fastest growing segment, now at a 31.2% share up from a 30% in the first three quarters of 2014.

Transactional On Demand -- pay-per-view special events -- continued to decline, now with a 7.1% share through the first nine months of 2015 down from a 8.6% in the previous year for the same time period.

1 comment about "Live TV, DVR Viewing Rises, Even As Pay TV Shrinks".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, March 30, 2016 at 5:12 p.m.

    That works out to almost 15 hours of live plus delayed TV "viewing" per home. OK, so its device usage,not viewing, but still, if the average is 14.8 hours, imagine what a quintile analysis would show for the heaviest using fifth of all homes---do they consume 24 hours of TV content per day? Gulp!

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