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With so much interest in the burgeoning OTT streaming arena, it’s important to keep abreast of research on this topic as it becomes available. A recent press release from comScore, using its ongoing meter panel, is noteworthy in this regard.
According to comScore, 63% of the 94 million households with Wi-Fi streamed content via OTT access (Roku, Apple TV, game consoles, etc.) in February 2018, and these homes averaged 50 hours of such activity for that month. This works out to about 31-32 hours per home, or just over one hour per day, when projected against all Wi-Fi households. But that’s a device usage stat, not a personal viewing finding. Based on the comScore data, we estimate that, across all Wi-Fi households, the average adult probably watched OTT streamed content 35-40 minutes per day.
ComScore also analyzed OTT streaming frequency and found that 50% of the streaming homes did 90% of the streaming in terms of time spent (again these are household usage, not viewing figures). Converting this to all Wi-Fi households, including non-streamers, approximately 32% of Wi-Fi homes generated 90% of the streaming activity for February 2018. This is a somewhat higher concentration of usage time—or audience tonnage—than is usually seen in studies of linear TV usage. Typically, 30-35% of the population does 75-80% of all TV viewing.
The comScore release also noted that light streamers were, not surprisingly, more likely than heavy streamers to be pay TV subscribers and more likely to be concentrated in the younger head-of-house age groups (18-34s, mainly). This does not necessarily mean that younger household heads themselves were frequent streamers, since these homes tend to have more residents than older households, and game console activity—a favorite of kids and, especially, teens—was included in the calculations.
Recently, various TV networks have been giving the impression that they are taking steps to massively reduce ad clutter in their program content. NBC has tried to sell time buyers a limited number of ads in very short breaks, but only in new series on its primetime schedule for the broadcast network and its cable channels (Bravo, CNBC, E!, Oxygen, SyFy, USA and MSNBC). Fox has sold a very small number of short ad breaks in its Sunday night lineup for next fall. There have been a few indications of small reductions in the length of regular, cluttered breaks, but it remains to be seen how this will pan out and whether viewers will truly see a major decrease in the number of TV ads they are exposed to, particularly if the networks can’t obtain the much higher CPMs they are asking for ads in their limited number of short breaks.
While we await results on this new strategy to reduce clutter, here is a look at a Kantar Media comparison of the first quarter of 2017 and 2018, which found basically no change in the amount of primetime ad/promotional clutter by the major broadcast and cable entities.
