NEW YORK – Global consumers are opting for laptops and desktops over televisions sets when watching TV shows, says new data from Accenture.
A new Accenture survey, summarized in the report Winning Experiences in the New Video World, found that the percentage of consumers who prefer watching TV shows on television sets plummeted by 55% over the past year, from 52% to 23%.
More than four in 10 consumers (42%) said they would rather view TV shows on a laptop or desktop, up from 32% in last year’s survey. Thirteen percent said they prefer watching TV shows on their smartphones, compared with 10% last year, while only one in five consumers (19%) now prefer to watch sports games on their TVs, down from 38% in the prior-year survey.
The decline in TV viewing over the past year tracks with a four-year trend, continues the report. As recently as 2014, the survey revealed that nearly two-thirds (65%) of consumers preferred the TV set for viewing TV shows.
“The dominance of the TV set as the undisputed go-to entertainment device is ending,” said Gavin Mann, global managing director for Accenture’s broadcast business, in the report’s news release. “Driving this rapid shift in consumer preferences is the growing convenience, availability and quality of more personalized and compelling content on laptop and desktop personal computers and smartphones. The massive and accelerating push by communications and media companies to provide ubiquitous content – TV everywhere including over-the-top – has empowered consumers to access high-quality content across multiple devices.”
While consumers increasingly prefer to watch TV shows on laptops and desktops, the smartphone is becoming the preferred device for watching short video clips. In the most-recent survey, more than one-third (41%) of consumers said they would rather view these clips on their mobile handsets, a substantial increase from 28% last year. In contrast, the number of consumers who said they would rather watch video clips on their laptops and desktops dropped slightly, from 47% to 44% over the last year, while the number who said they prefer to view these clips on their TV sets dropped even more, from 16% to only 5%.
The global online survey polled 26,000 consumers in 26 countries, including Canada, between October and November 2016. The sample in each country was representative of the online population, and the ages of respondents ranged from 14-to-55 and over.
