What They Say
Conviva said that in the last year the time spent streaming TV in Europe had grown 122% while globally there was an increase of 157% in viewing hours using SmartTVs. That was even higher in Europe at 203%. However, the growth in viewing on TVs was much less than the 607% increase in viewing on consoles.
Big screens captured more than 75% of all viewing time in Q4, led by Roku with a 31% share of all TV viewing and followed by Amazon Fire TV (19%) and Samsung TV (10%).
Big screens also dominated in engagement. Television viewers watched for an average of 28.7 minutes each time they pressed play. Chromecast demanded the longest watch time at 35.5 minutes per play, followed closely by Roku at 33.3 minutes per play. In contrast, mobile phones tallied just 8.6 minutes per play.
Data for Conviva’s State of Streaming report was primarily collected from Conviva’s proprietary sensor technology currently embedded in 3.3 billion streaming video applications, measuring in excess of 500 million unique viewers watching 180 billion streams per year with 1.5 trillion real-time transactions per day across more than 180 countries.
What We Think
It’s great that SmartTVs are now ‘good enough’ for most viewing of OTT content after years of being a second grade experience compared to STBs or other devices. The development will also have been helped by continued work in DRMs etc to integrate OTT content with broadcast viewing. (BR)
I couldn’t resist this image which shows that in an upcoming version of GoogleTV, there will be an option to ‘turn off the smarts’. We had older guests at our Airbnb who didn’t like our satellite set-up and wanted ‘proper TV’ e.g. just FTA.
