Adobe’s new bi-annual Video Benchmark Report finds that viewers rapidly increasing their consumption of TV everywhere offerings, with the number of video starts of authenticated content jumping by 388% from the second quarter of 2013 to the second quarter of 2014.
Big events like the Olympics, March Madness and the World Cup were particularly important drivers in TV everywhere usage, the report found.
Broadcast and cable networks also saw a sharp 81% increase in monthly consumption of authenticated episodic content from 3.1 episodes a month in 2013 to 5.6 shows a month in the current report.
Authenticated sports content had a more modest increase of 31% from 3.2 sporting events a year ago to 4.2 sporting events a month.
Overall the second quarter of 2014 saw 38.2 billion online video starts, up 47.3% from a year earlier.
In terms of ads, viewers watch 2.08 ads per video start in the second quarter of 2014, climbing 25.8% from a year earlier.
The upsurge in consumption was based on 165 billion total online video starts and 1.53 billion online TV authentications from 1,300 media and entertainment sites measured by Adobe Analytics and Adobe Primetime.
A video discussing the trends can be found here and the full report here.
The data showed that unique monthly viewers accessing network content from browsers and apps jumped by 146% year over year on all their online TV platforms.
And that growth seems to be accelerating. Just the last six months, the unique visitors grew 85%.
Also for the first time, Adobe reported that watching movies online is more popular than watching sports content. Movie networks saw a 125% increase year over year from two movies to 4.5 movies per month.
The report found that viewing continues to fragment across platforms.
Game consoles and OTT devices were the fastest growing way to access content. Their market share nearly doubled, jumping 194% of the last year, from 3% of the device types used to consume online TV content to 10% in the current report.
Apps for Apple’s iOS are still the most popular way to access online TV, with a 51% market share, up from 48% in 2013.
But Android apps continue to grow rapidly, from 16% to a 20% market share. In contrast browsers declined by 41% from 33% in 2013 to 19% in the current report.
Smartphone consumption also grew rapidly and now accounts for 13.6% of online video starts, up from 8.5% a year earlier. Interestingly, tablets fell behind smart phones and grew at a slower rate from 10.1% market share in the second quarter of 2014 to 13% in the most recent report.
Overall, smartphones and tablets were used in 26% of online video views, making them an increasingly important device category for online video consumption.
But people tend to view content for longer times on desktops. Overall Adobe reports that users who watched at least 25% of a video were three times more likely to reach 75% completion of a video.
In contrast, only 16.6% of videos on smartphones were watched three quarters of the way through.
