Despite finding high-speed Internet service in almost every home, with weekly video consumption up more than 37 hours per household, new data from Parks Associates contends 62% of U.S. broadband households still subscribe to a traditional pay-TV service, down from 69% in Q1 2019.
“The explosion of online viewing options and video consumption came at the same time many shelter-in-place orders were enacted,” research director Steve Nason said in a statement.
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Nason said as households rely more on OTT services, the spike in online video consumption and decrease in linear-only households, the gap between OTT and traditional pay-TV is widening.
“Traditional services are looking to migrate to the cloud to get the best of pay-TV and OTT,” he said.
Nuno Sanches, GM, media & telecom at New York-based software company Kaltura, said the paradigm shift in the pay-TV consumption underscores the benefits of putting cloud-based TV at the heart of the ecosystem. He says cloud TV combines the agility, speed, and multiscreen usability of OTT, with the reliability, robustness and scale of pay-TV.
“Just five years ago it was considered impossible to deliver operator-grade service from the cloud,” Sanches said. “The economics was perceived to be too expensive, and it seemed that telecom operators would not accept the perceived loss of control involved in utilizing the open Internet to deliver pay-TV services. But today, we have multinational pay-TV operators embracing online TV.”