In 2015, about 181.0 million people in the United States will be watching video via a VOD service app or website that provides streaming content over the internet and bypasses traditional distribution, according to eMarketer’s first-ever forecast of over-the-top (OTT) video viewership.
The forecast includes viewers of services like Hulu, Netflix and Youtube, and estimates that at this point, the population is already growing decently butslowly. Nearly nine in 10 digital video viewers in the US already watch video content this way. That’s largely because one provider of OTT video services is the giant YouTube, which is already used by virtually all OTT video viewers. The YouTube audience will reach 170.7 million monthly video viewers this year, eMarketer estimates, or 94.3% of OTT video service users. Other services have lower penetration and much faster growth.
