Credit: Wired.com
Looking at the numbers, it does seem that live television is still alive, well, and has an important role to play this year and beyond. OTT may be supplementary, but it's crucial to most households nonetheless, and it still leads innovation regarding modern viewing.
The popularity of the a-la-carte TV bundle
According to a study from Ampere, today's consumers are forking out more than ever before on TV services by combining pay TV, VOD and SVOD services to suit their viewing needs.
The same study found out that at the end of Q1 2017, some 40% of respondents had built a custom TV bundle, up from 24% in mid-2015.
As the demand for TV services grows and the market is 'bulking out', people are crafting their own TV bundles from all the options available, rather than abandoning their pay TV operators through the cord-cutting process.
In Europe and North America, there are some consumers combining pay TV services and SVOD platforms to provide themselves with a viewing experience tailored to their exact tastes. It seems that there is a place for pay TV in the future - as the chart shows...
Combining OTT and traditional TV
Delving further into the matter, Comscore discovered that one-third of the OTT audience is ‘cordless’. This pie chart will give you a better picture…
However, more than two-thirds of OTT households still use OTT as a supplement to their cable or satellite service package. And what’s more, even the heaviest of OTT households still spend a lot more time watching live TV than streamed entertainment - once again suggesting that love to combine the two mediums.
Another interesting insight from the study shows that live television, DVR and OTT all share the same ‘primetime’ slot, with viewing peaking in the evening hours - though it’s most pronounced for DVR between the hours of 7pm and 11pm.
Also, households with a mix of television and OTT still consume more than five hours of live TV for every one hour spent watching OTT content - interesting, considering the impact OTT has had on the world of entertainment in recent years.
According to Ampere's projections, subscription services have generated US$18bn of entirely new revenue over the last two years, worldwide. Almost half (45%) of this new revenue was driven by SVOD services, the remainder by traditional cable and satellite companies.
Even though that a small-scale cannibalisation of subscription TV services is expected, the general trend is for increased consumption of entertainment instead of less. As time rolls on, content providers and broadcasters who can seamlessly combine the two mediums to offer one superior viewing experience will come out on top.
Read more on makes a winning SVOD service:
