TORONTO – With game consoles like XBox 360, PS3 and Wii in nearly half of Canadian Internet households – and with over half of them Internet enabled and connected to the living room TV for gaming and movies – more Canadian televisions are ready for Internet video content, says the latest edition of Solution Research Group’s Digital Life Canada quarterly.
The study also found that 23% of Canadians connect their laptop or another computer to their main TVs (8% always, 15% sometimes) when they need to watch something on the big screen.
All told, this means over one-third (35%) of the main television sets in Canadian households are connected to the Internet at least some of the time, either via game consoles or laptops – and 47% of online Canadians say that would now prefer to rent movies online than going to the video store (up from 33% saying the same thing only one year ago).
Among online Canadians under 35, a majority (51%) now say they have connected a laptop or an Internet-enabled game console connected to their TVs.
“This new research is good news for Netflix and movie studios looking for additional online opportunities to monetize their content,” says the report.
As well, according to the study, 80% of online Canadians are aware of Netflix and 8% of these used the free trial; Netflix is expecting to cross the one million subscriber threshold in Canada by this summer.
In contrast, the recently-launched Cineplex movie downloading service was familiar to just 17% of online Canadians and fewer than one-in-ten of those used the service.
In other findings:
• When asked what content they watched when they connect their laptops to a TV, 41% said movies, 25% said TV shows.
• Average age of a laptop/TV viewer was 33.
• Internet-connected game consoles were more likely to be used for online gaming (57%) but 15% mentioned using the consoles for movie downloads or Netflix streams.
These findings come from SRG’s independent Digital Life Canada syndicated study, based on quarterly interviews with 1,000 respondents 12 and older. The latest round of interviews were conducted in early January 2011.
