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.
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.