Relatively Little TV Content Being Viewed on Mobile Devices, Study Says
Though a growing amount of video content is being viewed on mobile devices, TVs remain the most popular device for watching video, especially among older viewers, said a “TV Untethered” study by the Council for Research Excellence (CRE). U.S. mobile TV viewers tend to be younger than traditional TV viewers, with a mean age of 35, said Laura Cowan, co-chair of CRE’s Media Consumption & Engagement Committee (MCEC) and LIN Media research director, during a briefing on the study in New York Wednesday.
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Twenty-eight percent of TV content viewing was done on mobile devices among those surveyed who were 15 to 24 years old and had such a device, compared with 18 percent for those 25-34, 12 percent for those 35-49 and 8 percent for those 50-64, CRE said. Mobile TV viewers are often heavy overall TV viewers and are more likely than non-mobile-TV viewers to be TV show opinion leaders and to use social media to talk about TV, it said. Mobile TV viewers also tend to be higher income professionals with graduate degrees and reflect more ethnic diversity than non-mobile-TV users, CRE said. They also tend to be more “tech-savvy” than those who only view TV content via traditional TV sets and are more likely to be “cord cutters,” said Cowan, who oversaw the study with Joanne Burns, MCEC co-chairwoman and executive vice president-marketing, research and new media at Fox’s 20th Television division. Fourteen percent of the mobile TV viewers surveyed had no pay-TV service in their homes, said CRE.
Mobile TV viewers are more focused on TV content when viewed on their smartphones than on larger devices, CRE also said. Viewers performed unrelated multi-tasking on other electronic devices during only 14 percent of the occasions in which they viewed TV programming on smartphones, it said. That compared to 27 percent for tablet viewing of TV content, 31 percent for computer viewing and 34 percent of TV set viewing occasions, it said. Viewers watching a TV show on a smartphone also were more likely to engage in online activities related to that show, including looking up show information or posting about the show on social networks, it said. Such activity occurred during 21 percent of the TV set viewing occasions, 27 percent for tablet viewing occasions, 31 percent for computer viewing occasions and 39 percent of the smartphone viewing occasions, it said.
Market research company Chadwick Martin Bailey did the study for CRE. U.S. viewers aged 15-64 first took part in an online survey Jan. 14-27 and viewers in Atlanta, Kansas City and Phoenix later took part in in-home interviews, said CRE. About 1,300 respondents owned no mobile devices, while about 1,500 had such devices but didn’t watch TV content on them, and about 3,100 watched TV content on their mobile devices, said Cowan. More than 393,000 TV viewing occasions were encompassed in the study, said CRE. Of the 315 million estimated people living in the U.S., the “addressable market” of people 15-64 who view more than five hours of TV content a week and have broadband in their homes is 121.2 million, said Cowan. Twenty-one percent of the addressable market have no mobile devices, while 47 percent of that market have such devices but don’t use them for TV viewing, and 32 percent have mobile devices and watch TV content with them, she said. While that third group is sizable, the second group still represents the majority of the addressable market, she said. That third group also only makes up 12 percent of the entire U.S. population, so the number of U.S. viewers watching TV content on mobile devices remains relatively small, she said. Only 2 percent of all TV hours encompassed in the study were seen via mobile devices, she said. Viewing of TV content via set-top boxes including Roku was classified as viewing on a TV for the purposes of the study, Cowan said during a Q-and-A session.
Most TV viewing on mobile devices occurs in the home, driven mainly by convenience, and not to avoid advertising, CRE said last month in providing a sample of the study’s findings (CD June 4 p17). About 82 percent of participants said they viewed mobile content on a tablet and 64 percent viewed content on a smartphone, it said then. Nearly 50 percent of participants cited “more convenient” as their top reason for viewing video on a mobile device, it said. “Only 5 percent cited ‘fewer ads.'” Content availability often drives device selection, it said.
People are increasingly moving devices “from room to room” and taking them “out of the home, and on their commutes” to view TV content, Burns said in a news release Wednesday. TV sets “still rule in the home, even for the younger demographics -- but elsewhere, and even in the home for multi-taskers, smartphones are becoming an important device for viewing professional TV content,” she said. “It all goes to convenience and portability; more people are watching more TV -- everywhere -- and increasingly on smartphones.” The research suggested that “greater audience measurement needs to be directed at smartphone viewing,” she said.