The number of homes in the US subscribing to paid cable TV is falling, as consumers switch to free TV and online streaming for their media needs, according to new research.
Americans spend more than 33 hours per week watching video across the screens, according to the latest Nielsen Cross-Platform Report. But how they’re consuming content—traditional TV and otherwise—is changing.
Demonstrating that consumers are increasingly making Internet connectivity a priority, 75.3 percent pay for broadband Internet (up from 70.9% last year); 90.4 percent pay for cable, telephone company-provided TV or satellite. Homes with both paid TV and broadband increased 5.5 percent since last year.
Changes are afoot, however, as consumers seek out the entertainment option that makes the most sense for them.
The number of homes subscribing to wired cable has decreased 4.1 percent in the past year at the same time that telephone company-provided and satellite TV have seen increases of 21.1 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively.
Broadcast-Only/Broadband Homes in Focus
Though less than 5 percent of TV households, homes with broadband Internet and free, broadcast TV are on the rise—growing 22.8 percent over last year.
These households are also found to exhibit interesting video behaviours: they stream video twice as much as the general population and watch half as much TV.
Whether they’re cord-cutters or former broadcast-only homes that upgraded to Internet service, these homes represent a very small but growing group of U.S. consumers.
Interestingly, roughly the same percentage of consumers in broadcast-only/broadband homes watch traditional TV, stream or use the Internet as in all cross-platform homes; the difference between these groups falls to time spent on these activities.
Even broadcast-only/broadband homes spend the majority of their video time watching traditional TV: 122.6 minutes, compared to 11.2 for streaming on average each day.
Source: www.Nielsen.com
One Comment
Comments are closed.
I think everyone’s being very quick to jump on this as part of a larger trend.
There’s another Nielsen released a study a few months back saying that TV ownership was in decline for the first time since 1992 (down by 1%), yet in the same research, they noted that a) houses with three or more TV sets had increased and b) the average time spent watching TV is now a “record” 59 hours 28 minutes of TV watching per week.
The teen age group watched TV for 23 hours 41 minutes per week. That’s 3.38 hours per day.
Let’s say that a teen is in school for 6 hours a day, goes to bed at 10 and gets up at 7:30, there’s around 8 hours of potential free time, of which TV takes up 42%.
Hardly a small number when you consider all the other things those pesky teens are doing.