SMB Technology
Tuning in: the future of online media consumption habits
by Keris Lahiff
The future of media consumption has arrived – a survey into online TV behaviour has found the lines between the different mediums of social media, traditional TV and online TV are becoming increasingly blurred.
SideReel, the largest online TV destination with more than 10 million monthly users, surveyed more than 1800 participants to gauge their online TV experience and behaviour in January 2011.
“People are mixing new technologies with familiar ones to get a personalised TV experience that includes all of their favourite shows,” says Roman Arzhintar, SideReel’s CEO. “For many, traditional TV watching is starting to supplement online watching, rather than the other way around.”
Among the trends identified, the survey found that social networking wasn’t a top priority in media consumption, integrating different devices was gaining prevalence and the move towards ‘cord cutting’ (that is, opting for online over traditional TV) was becoming increasingly common.
For instance, despite its prevalence in other aspects of online behaviour, the survey found the majority of individuals accessing online TV found social networking to be unimportant. Only 25 per cent of online TV watchers said social media was important, while only 10 per cent of users said they would broadcast what they were watching or planned to watch to those in their online social networks. Down 50 per cent since last year, only 25 per cent of those surveyed said they wanted to know what those in their online social networks were watching.
A trend on the increase, however, was the number of people integrating their traditional TV sets with their computers. Forty per cent of those surveyed said they had connected their computer to their TV over the past month – a three-fold increase since the same time last year. Of those, 60 per cent connect their computer directly to their TV, while five per cent use online TV models such as Roku or Google TV. As for subscription-based online TV, 70 per cent of those who stream paid video content to do using Netflix.
And, in a trend known as ‘cord-cutting’, those who watch more than 10 hours of online content per week are less likely to have cable TV than those who watch fewer than 10 hours – this may contribute to the trend of forgoing the purchase of a traditional TV set, instead solely watching online content.
Finally, tech integration is trending, with 30 per cent of those surveyed owning an iOS (Apple) device, 16 per cent with an Android device, and more than five per cent owning an iPad.
With traditional television stations struggling to hold audiences like they used to, the move towards online media consumption looks only set to continue. However, as those corporations launch their own online video channels, the line between traditional and online continues to haze.
Published on: Thursday, May 26, 2011
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