TV Everywhere (TVE) services are getting some use in pay-TV households.
According to a new report from GfK, 53 percent of homes with a pay-TV subscription say they use TVE services to get content on PCs, TVs and mobile devices. That’s up 10 percentage points since 2012.
Not surprisingly, mobile devices are mostly driving the growth. The percentage of respondents accessing network and service provider content via mobile websites or mobile applications has effectively doubled since 2012, while the use of smart TV apps has claimed a big chunk of the action since being pretty much non-existent in 2012.
Younger age groups (13-35 and 36-49) were two to four times more likely to use mobile and smart TV apps for watching than respondents in the 50-64 age group.
But as usage of TVE services grows, awareness of the term “TV Everywhere” has not. According to GfK, only 25 percent of the people it surveyed said they were familiar with the term.
“Consumer education continues to be a critical missing piece of the puzzle for TV Everywhere,” said David Tice, SVP in Media and Entertainment at GfK. “With a notable proportion of people in pay TV homes already using TVE, greater awareness and understanding of the services could drive even higher adoption. Greater success of TV Everywhere could help pay TV services stave off becoming ‘dumb’ broadband pipes, and also assist TV networks in maintaining their status as the original aggregators of high quality video content.”