TORONTO – Canadians are excited about high definition television and are falling in love with on line TV viewing. However, their yearning for PVR or VOD technology is proving far less intense.
So says the newest edition of Fast Forward, Solutions Research Group’s quarterly, ongoing syndicated research.
As of November 2008, when the company’s survey of 1,000 online Canadians was done, 37% of online households in Canada have been shown to have an HD-capable set, which translates to about 32% of all Canadian households – about four million homes. HD-box adoption has also grown and is now above the PVR numbers, says the research.
While a significant number of households continue to operate their HD sets without a HD box (about 1.5 million don’t have one), the gap has closed somewhat compared to last year, says the research company.
And as for those cable and satellite set top boxes that record TV shows, the personal video recorder, “PVRs show only gradual growth and penetration levels remain at about half of the levels we observe in the U.S.,” reads the press release. PVRs are in 1.7 million Canadian homes – a 13% penetration rate. Stateside, that rate is 25%.
And, “(a)mong digital cable subscribers overall, 12% use VOD on a weekly basis, a level that has been relatively flat for several quarters of tracking,” it adds.
Canadians also time-shift less that American TV viewers. During the survey period, 20% of Canadian viewers time-shifted their viewing of top prime time content, compared to 18% last year. In the U.S. during the same period, the company found 28% were time-shifting, up from 25% last year, in its American market research.
Moving away from the TV set, 41% of online Canadians report having watched a TV show via the Internet (streaming or P2P) on their PC at some point in the past . About half of this audience watch at least once weekly.
Of course, short video viewing is higher, with over 70% watching short clips or streaming content on a regular basis, which is double the rate of Q4 2006 viewing levels. Aside from YouTube, top-of-mind destinations for video content in Canada include Google, Facebook, CTV, Yahoo!, MSN, Global, MySpace and CBC – suggesting that boundaries between TV/video brands, aggregators and social brands are blurring, says SRG.
While the majority of visits to major network sites in Canada are still for news and schedule information, we are at the beginning of more engagement with online TV shows which have recently begun being streamed on these sites.
For example, 13% of visitors to globaltv.com said their main reason to visit was to watch a show online during the survey period, highest of the main networks. Nine percent of ctv.ca and 6% cbc.ca users said they visited those sites primarily to watch a TV show online last month.
In the U.S., where networks have been streaming for a number of years, a higher percentage of web visits are to view a specific show (31% of visits to abc.com – the U.S. market leader – are to view a specific show, for example).
“With greater availability of streaming, online Canadians are watching shows as diverse as House and Heroes to Grey’s Anatomy and Coronation Street online. And three-in-five online Canadians agree with the statement ‘soon all TV shows will be available for viewing on the Internet’,” reads the release.
Moving to that third, tinier screen, way back at the end of 2006, 90% of all activity on a wireless device was talking. Two years later, this number is down to 77%, with the balance taken up by texting/e-mail and rich media applications. Similarly, Canadians are using their wireless devices at home more – 56% doing so now versus 48% back in ’06.
And smart phone penetration is increasing in parallel, standing now at 16%.
