A new global study of 13 countries around the world, shows that while scheduled broadcast TV remains the most popular way to watch TV programming, its use declined in the last year as more consumers streamed on-demand TV online, according to a survey of 13,000 people conducted by the Ericsson ConsumerLab.
The study also highlighted the growing impact of social media on the way consumers watch TV. More than 40 percent of the respondents reported using social media on various devices such as smartphones and tablets while watching TV. Reality shows and sports showed particularly heavy social media usage.
Ericcson released its annual "TV & Video Consumer Trend Report 2011" in the run-up to IBC, where it will be highlighting a number of solutions for multiplatform and multi-screen video content delivery.
The global study found that the proportion of respondents who reported watching internet-based on-demand TV more than once per week grew from 30% last year to 33%% this year; in contrast, about 84 percent watched broadcast TV more than once per week, slightly down from 88% last year.
Data, which was collected from Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the U.K., the U.S. and South Korea, also showed slight declines in the proportion of those using DVDs and Blu-ray disks more than once a week from 30% to 29% this year.
Increases were seen in the proportion of those viewing of short clips on YouTube (growing from 44% of those surveyed to 47% this year), downloaded content (increasing from 26% to 29%) and streamed on demand movies (expanding from 23% to 25%).
Strangely, the study found a decline in the proportion watching recorded broadcast TV more than once a week from 50% last year to 45% this year.
"On-demand viewing is increasingly popular, while broadcast viewing has remained as the most common way for people to watch TV," commented Anders Erlandsson, senior advisor at Ericsson ConsumerLab, in a statement. "People want both broadcast and on-demand viewing to be available. TV and video have not been negatively affected by the internet in the same way that print has; we just watch TV in many more ways than we did before."
Hoping to capitalize on the growing interest in accessing more content on move devices by consumers, Ericsson will be launching a new solution, combining both hardware and software, to deliver entire multichannel line-ups to multiple screens at IBC.
"When you look at today's multi-screen TV offerings, it is clear that TV service providers are challenged by the scalability necessary to validate the various business models," noted Dr. Giles Wilson, head of technology, solution area TV, Ericsson. "Our new additions to the Multi-platform Stream Processor family uniquely provide operators with a truly next generation platform for delivering linear content to every new device of the future, enabling TV service providers to meet increasingly high demands for quality and video resolution."
The new solution combines the Ericsson SPR1200 Multiscreen Stream Processor, which provides the hardware for multi-screen compression, with the Ericsson NPR1200 Multiscreen Network Processor, a software-based adaptive streaming segmentation and encryption processor that is capable of handling the adaptive streaming formats and DRM systems needed to deliver content to multiple devices.
