How does the exploding number of screens available to consumers affect where they watch episodic TV and the viewing quality they expect? Most people could take a swing at an answer, but a new study is offering some cold, hard numbers.
Conviva and nScreenMedia released a report recently that addresses how viewers’ online streaming habits are impacted by devices, content type, location, and viewing quality. The data comes from analyzing more than 20 billion OTT video streams per month from more than 2 billion video viewing screens around the world, Conviva says, and the findings were reviewed, analyzed, and packaged by Colin Dixon, founder and principal analyst at nScreenMedia.
According to the research, connected TV usage increased a whopping 50 percent between Q1 2015 and Q1 2016, and PC and smartphone usage was said to have decreased 10 and 20 percent for video streaming, respectively. Binge watchers prefer a connected TV (40 percent more preferred than a tablet and 50 percent more preferred than both a smartphone or PC), the report says.
Close to eight out of 10 (79 percent) of out-of-home video requests analyzed in the study came from tablets and smartphones, and 13 percent came from laptops. Short-form content is said to be most popular within the home (19 percent live, 53 percent short, and 27 percent long) and long-form content is most popular outside the home (25 percent live, 36 percent short, and 39 percent long).
“As viewing times on connected TVs are rapidly approaching regular broadcast TV levels, it’s clear that video service providers need to carefully manage the viewing experience on every screen,” nScreenMedia’s Dixon says. “Never has it been more important to fix poor streaming performance.”
An infographic and details on how to download the study are available here.
