• by Wayne Friedman , April 29, 2025

Consumers continue to narrow big-screen video services they use, with a total of 9.9 different platforms in the fourth quarter of 2024, according to a new survey from TiVo.

The services include traditional pay TV (cable, satellite, telco); subscription video-on-demand (SVOD, ad-free and ad-supported) channels; virtual pay TV services, and advertising video-on-demand (AVOD).

This compares to 11.1 services used in the fourth quarter of 2023 and 11.6 services in the fourth quarter of 2022.

This has resulted in overall monthly entertainment spend steadily sinking to $157.47 -- from $176.84 in the year-ago fourth-quarter period of 2023 and from $189.38 in 2022.

The research shows consumers are less inclined to change the services they use, with 34.1% of respondents saying they do not plan to change their entertainment spending habits -- an increase of 6% versus a year ago.

Some of this lower activity in overall video usage has helped them to more easily find programming they want to watch.

“[The] discovery dilemma softens as consumers simplify their bundles,” according to the authors of the report. Research says 40.4% of respondents now use around two or three apps before “settling on something to watch”; it was 45.9% a year ago.

TiVo says the average total number of hours per day of video consumed -- from any source -- has stayed roughly the same over the last three years.

In the fourth quarter of 2024, that amounted to 4.5 hours, with 30% of that going to legacy pay TV and 28% for SVOD.

The survey found that “free AVOD” as well as FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) and social media account for 27%.

The TiVo survey was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2024 among 4,490 respondents age 18 and older.