Commentary
Good Old Traditional TV
- by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, April 11, 2017
According to data from comScore, courtesy of its latest US Cross-Platform Future-in- Focus Report, analyzed and reported by the Marketing Charts staff, among households with both traditional TV and OTT, Traditional rules the roost in terms of time spent, as OTT continues to act more as supplemental viewing than the main stage. In December 2016, for every hour these households spent watching OTT (a delivery method for video and audio over the Internet,) they spent almost 5-and-a-half hours with live TV.
Even the heaviest OTT viewers (the top 20% by duration watched) spent more than twice as much time with traditional TV (69% share) than with OTT video (31% share).
OTT v. Live TV in Dual Service Household (% share or total time spent with both services) | ||
Viewer Type (Duration) | OTT | Live TV |
Light OTT (Bottom 50%) | 2% | 98% |
Medium (20%-50%) | 14% | 86% |
Heavy (Top 20%) | 31% | 69% |
Source: ComScore, April 2017 (data 2016) | ||
When viewed in the context of video trends, says the report, Netflix now has almost as many subscribers as all of the top cable TV companies combined; and more TV households have access to the service than to a DVR. Meanwhile, traditional TV viewing time continues to dip for the public as a whole, while plunging among Millennials, who now spend more time with smartphone internet (apps + web) than with traditional TV.
In fact, when broadening the time debate to digital media (not just mobile) against live TV, even the 35-54 bracket now leans slightly towards digital, with the 55+ bracket the lone TV holdouts, says the study.
For the full year of 2016, the comScore data reveals that 84% of traditional TV viewing time was spent with live TV, says the report, with DVRs accounting for 14.9% and video-on-demand a nominal 1.1%.
Distribution of Total Traditional TV Viewing Time (Not including streaming via OTT) | ||
Viewing | % Share (Total) | % Share (Primetime) |
Live | 84.0% | 74.7% |
DVR | 14.9 | 24.6 |
VOD | 1.1 | 0.8 |
Source: ComScore, April 2017 (data 2016) | ||
Recorded content is more prevalent during primetime, with the DVR occupying almost one-quarter of viewing time for primetime TV. Even so, roughly three-quarters of primetime TV was watched live last year.
Some genres tend to be watched more live than others, says the report. News and sports are the most heavily consumed as they air, with 90% of this content watched live. Drama (71%) and reality shows (75%), by contrast, have lower shares of time spent with live TV. By far the most time-shifted content, however, is the thriller/horror show. An impressive 46% of this genre is time-shifted, with soap operas (34%) and action/adventure content (31%) also seeing a fairly high percentage of time-shifting.
The complete comScore report for additional information may be accessed here
Jack Loechner is the Editor of The Center for Media Research's daily Research Brief. You can reach him at jack@mediapost.com.
Jack's numbers are accurate, but the information as presented by comScore downplays the disruption of OTT on TV viewing habits by focusing on OTT households that still have cable or satellite service. If you add in the 31% of OTT households that are "OTT only" (i.e., have cut the cord), OTT households consume 1 hour of OTT for every 2 hours of linear TV viewing.
Close to two thirds of US households consume OTT content, so if you net it all out, OTT accounts for 20% of Total US TV view time, nearly 3X the share it had in Q4 2013. With live news, sports, and local programming now becoming available over the top, look for OTT to continue to take big bites out of traditional TV view time over the next 1 - 3 years.
David, what's your source for the statement that 31% of U.S, homes have cut the cord and are OTT-only?
Not 31% of all US homes - 31% of US Homes with OTT. Source is an earlier slide in the same comScore report cited in Jack's article.
Thanks for that clarification, David. I also note in another comScore analysis that only 49 million homes--- 41-42% of all U.S. homes-- accessed one or more OTT services in December 2016 and these homes spent approximately 42 hours per month using their devices for this purpose. If we assume that 60% of the residents in these homes were involved during an average minute of device usage, that means that average monthly OTT viewing time, per OTT- accessing home resident was around 25 hours per month, or 50 minutes daily. If this is correct then the majority of the TV/video consumption by such people must still be linear TV content.
That's right - two thirds of TV consumption in OTT homes is still linear TV. Still, my takeaway from the comScore report is the remarkable growth of OTT, especially considering there are still sizeable content content gaps (sports, news), and OTT viewing requires some amount of habit change on the part of consumers. While TV has resisted the forces of digital longer than other forms of entertainment, it appears to be heading toward a tipping point, driven by increasing consumer demand to control the viewing experience, disintermediation of traditional producer-distributor relationships, and a crumbling economic model ...
One has to admire your faith and stamina regarding the shifting of "linear TV" viewing to digital, David. And you are right, content is the key. If digital venues can provide more and better content than the TV establishment in the form of entertainment fare, news coverage, sports, and many other program types, as well as user-friendly, large screen platforms for enjoying said content, the great shift may, at last, begin to happen. If not and OTT becomes swamped with broadcast network fare as well as porgrams supplied by major cable channels and local station news, including commercials---as seems to be developing with the new skinny bundles---then all bets will be off.
I might also add that last time I looked, according to Nielsen's national TV rating panel, only 2-3% of U.S. homes did not have at least one TV set. If I am correct about this, it means that "linear TV" can be seen by 97-98% of all households, mostly via cable and satellite distribution but also, in some cases by over-the-air reception. In contrast, ComScore's panel tells us that approximately 15% of all homes do not have a TV set and are OTT-only. This is a pretty big discrepancy and should be investigated by the ad agencies. It's not a question of panel size but of its composition and whether the panel is truly representative of the nation as a whole. If Nielsen is correct, OTT usage is not as frequent as some believe. If comScore is more accurate, OTT usage may be more frequent than many realize.