• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 15, 2023

As far as evolutions go, the television set's appears to be reaching a new epoch -- one that's less about conventional TV viewing and more about other stuff.

This morning my colleagues Wayne Friedman and Karlene Lukovitz report on two milestones benchmarking this, and I also received new trend data from Hub Entertainment Research reinforcing that.

Wayne's reporting shows that, for the first time ever, non-linear sources -- including both streaming and "other" -- surpassed the share of all linear (broadcast and cable) viewing in July, according to Nielsen data.

Nielsen's "other" category, which incudes use of television sets for things other than conventional TV viewing, rose to 11.6% in July, up nearly a point from 10.9% in June.

Meanwhile, Karlene reports on Netflix's push to offer cloud-based gaming via smart TVs, too.

These trends make sense, because TV sets have long had the ability to connect with other forms of digital media -- initially as dumb monitors vis a vis internet or digital device connections -- but increasingly as their own direct portals to anything, anyone wants to render on a CTV device.

According to Hub's ongoing tracking data, the share of American CTV households utilizing their sets for something other than conventional TV programming has jumped from less than two-thirds in 2020 to more than three-quarters this year.

"The most popular non-TV feature is using a smart TV to listen to a streaming music or audio service; this almost doubled from 2020 to 2023," Hub notes, adding, "The second most popular, mirroring or casting another device’s screen to the smart TV, almost tripled in use during that time."