NEW YORK – The percentage of Americans who have downloaded a television show from the Internet has doubled in the past year, but it’s still early days for adopting the technology, a survey by market researcher Ipsos indicates.
In June 2005, just 2% of Americans aged 12 and up had ever downloaded a TV show online. A year later, that had increased to 5%. The activity is most common among men (6% vs. 3% of women) and youths aged 18 to 24 (14%). In all, Ipsos estimates that 10 million Americans have ever downloaded a TV show, with seven million of them doing so in the previous 30 days to the June 2006 survey.
TV program downloading is less popular than downloading streamed music videos (which 18% of Americans 12 and up have ever done as of June 2006), video games (14%), music videos (10%), and movie trailers (9%). Only downloading full-length movies (3%) was less common than TV shows, the survey found.
It seems the smaller the file size (and the final product), the more likely people are to download it. “Today, many consumers utilize the digital channel to access more ‘disposable’ video: content that is brief in nature and takes up little bandwidth, so it’s very easily consumed,” said Todd Board, Senior VP of the Ipsos Insight Technology & Communications practice and author of the study. “This emerging genre of video is being driven by its growing availability on sites such as YouTube and MySpace, but also perpetuated by the ‘two-foot’ user interface of the PC, which is less than ideal for the larger, more involved genres such as the full-length movies dominant on the ‘ten-foot’ interface in consumers’ living rooms.”
It’s important for broadcasters and the rest of the industry to see how consumers regard video as different than audio, Board says. “Savvy product developers and marketers will need to cultivate a forward-looking view of the segments likely to emerge around unmet and under-met needs for video consumption. For digital music, the primary catalyst was the music enthusiast seeking individual song downloads that offered portability and ownership. For digital video, there are inherently more potential catalysts, including music videos, movie trailers, and increasingly, TV shows with intense audience involvement. Because of this variety in the drivers of digital video appeal, it’s critical to understand where digital entertainment aficionados have similar usage expectations for video as they currently have for music, and where they don’t.”
The survey found that about 27% of portable MP3 players have the ability to play video, a number that has been steadily increasing over the past year; 5% of MP3 player owners have paid to download television programs from the Internet versus only 1% of those who do not own MP3 players.
