March 10, 2008

A Look Into The Habits Of US TV Viewers

A December 2007 online survey of 1002 Americans conducted by ABI Research yielded some interesting finds. Conducted to learn more about how Americans view their service providers, what technologies they use and how price sensitive they are, here is the results of the survey broken down into numbers:

38% of respondents have home theaters or game consoles attached to their televisions
38% of respondents use DVRs
25% of respondents chose their pay-TV service based on price
25% of respondents chose their pay-TV service based on convenience and promotional offers
15-20% of respondents chose their pay-TV service provider based on programming quality and customer service
6% of respondents were interested in mobile TV
35% of respondents would not pay for common add-on services
65% of respondents said online news clips was their preferred online video content
43% of respondents said movie trailers was their preferred online video content
43% of respondents said that user-generated content was their preferred online video content
53% of respondents use pay-per-view services to watch movies only a few times per year
40% of respondents own at least one HDTV
<50% of those HDTV owners actually subscribe to HD content

So what does this all mean? According to ABI Research, PVRs, DVRs, gaming, home theater installs, free content in exchange for ad views, HDTVs are all hot commodities. Network media adapters, the Slingbox, pay-per-view and program quality not so much. One insight gained from the research, which is not surprising, is that despite the fact that many people own HDTV's, very few actual subscribe to HD content or care about programming quality when choosing a pay-TV service provider. Can we say consumer education?!

Via Digitimes