Some 63% of broadband households had at least one TV connected to the Internet – either directly via smart TVs or indirectly via game consoles, set-top boxes, wireless modems or other ancillary Net-to-TV devices – as of this January, up from 53% a year ago, according to new market research from TDG, The Diffusion Group.
The national average of Net-connected TVs in U.S. broadband households was 1.6, “meaning a large portion of users own multiple Net-connected TVs,” according to TDG’s “Benchmarking the Connected Consumer, 2014,” which reveals that 42% of connected TV owners have two or more.
“Whether net-to-TV video will somehow topple traditional pay-TV service models has been a red herring from the beginning,” said TDG president and director of research Michael Greeson. “The real debate is the extent to which the growing availability and expanding use of ‘OTT TV’ services will have on the time viewers spend watching traditional pay-TV given the growing array of sources at their disposal.
“While not a simple a zero-sum game, we are nearing or at that breaking point where the growing use of broadband-based sources simply chips away at time once spent using traditional sources. This is hardly a radical argument, and made all the more inevitable given these new findings.”
