Written by: Roshan Dwivedi
While the rise of standalone streaming services has been fueled, in part, by increased connection speeds combined with the ubiquity of smart mobile devices, video consumption is still often taking place in the living room. And in the case of Hulu’s OTT video service, living room viewing is actually on the rise. Today, living room viewing accounts for over 58 percent of Hulu’s content streams, the company reports, up from 44 percent back in the first quarter of 2014.
The rise has been fairly rapid – by the third quarter of last year, watching Hulu via living room devices was already at 50 percent.
The trend is not limited to Hulu, either. In a recent industry report from Freewheel, the firm noted that video viewing via over-the-top streaming devices is up 380 percent year-over-year, while viewing over smartphones is up 105 percent.
Hulu’s SVP of Advertising Sales, Peter Naylor, shared this and other data from Hulu’s network with Media Village in June, where he also noted the impacts the trend was having on Hulu’s viewership numbers. That is, the company now has to account for the fact that many of Hulu’s streams are being watched by multiple people at a time. By working with comScore, Hulu found that its over-the-top streams average 1.4 viewers per stream, but on some devices and for certain shows, co-viewing is higher – up to 2.x at times. In other words, streaming media services are being watched more like traditional TV: on the big screen in the living room, with other friends and family gathered around.
Read the entire story here.
Add your comment