Commentary

No Cannibals Here; Revision3 Said Over-the-Top Boosts Viewership and is Growing Fast

With programming geared for the technophiles and gadget hounds of the world, online TV network Revision3 has always attracted an early adopter audience. Now, that audience is watching Revision3 shows all over the place, validating the programming theory, “if you build it, they will come.” Revision3 saw a 75% increase in content views on over-the-top devices so far this year, according to a white paper it recently released. The network studied viewership patterns for its content across devices such as Roku, Apple TV, Sony PS3, Microsoft XBox, Google TV, Windows Media Center, as well as smartphones and mobile devices.

The shift started earlier this year, Revision3 said. The percent of its viewers watching on over-the-top venues grew from 25% of all Revision3 viewers at the start of the year to 40% of them in August, presenting a three-quarter increase in over-the-top traffic, the company said. Overall views across online, mobile and over-the-top is growing for the programmer, which counts 20 million uniques watching 70 million views each month — numbers that are increasing for both online and over-the-top. Both forms of viewing are on the rise, but over-the-top consumption is shooting up more quickly.

That’s partly because Revision3 has moved aggressively to offer its shows in alternate venues to give consumers a multitude of viewing options. “Viewers, when taken as a total percentage of our viewing audience, are migrating from online viewing towards over-the-top, which includes both leanback experience boxes and mobile viewing,” said Rob DeMillo, the company’s new chief technology officer. “One of the assumptions of the digital media age was that if consumers of media are no longer restricted to rigidly defined playback methods and devices, they would pursue those alternative methods to consume media whenever/wherever they wished. This study backs that claim. Although iOS is currently dominating our over-the-top viewing experience by consuming half of the over-the-top views, another quarter are Android devices and the remaining quarter are ‘leanback’ devices connected to television screens.”

DeMillo expects this phenomenon applies to other content producers as well. The prevalence of new devices has underscored that if the process is simple enough, people will consume their media across a wide range of devices, DeMillo said.

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