VOD in 50% US homes by 2016
January 27, 2011
The revised year-end 2016 forecast for DVR Subscriber Households now stands at 61.8 million (50 per cent of TV households), up from 37.9 million (32 per cent of TV households) as of the end of Q3 2010. By 2016, it is expected that VOD (redefined to include OTT services like Netflix, Vudu and Hulu) will reach 70.1 million households (57 per cent of television households). This compares with 51.1 million VOD households (44 per cent of total TV households) at the end of Q3 2010, according to MagnaGlobal’s quarterly report.
As of the end of Q3 2010, some 83.6 million homes – 70.9 per cent of the total – were online; 90.4 per cent of these homes accessed the Internet using broadband services. MAGNA’s long-term internet access forecasts now call for 98.8 million households to be online in 2016, of which 97.8 million will have broadband services.
DVR subscription growth details in US:
– DirecTV now has 8.9 million DVRs by their estimates, as 75 per cent of new subscribers took either HD and/or DVR boxes during Q3 2010. This compares to 7.6 million DVR subscribers at DISH Network. 49.8 per cent of satellite subscribers now have DVRs.
– Comcast added 190,000 advanced service customers during the quarter. With 9.9 million HD and/or DVR subscribers, Comcast has approximately 5.8 million DVR subscribers –over 25 per cent of the company’s total subscriber base.
– Time Warner Cable’s DVR subscriptions increased by 13,000 in Q3 2010 (vs. 61,000 in Q2 ‘10 and 111,000 in Q1 ‘10). Total DVR subscribers totaled 4.6 million at quarter’s end, 36.5 per cent of the company’s subscriber base.
– Charter recently mentioned that nearly half of its digital subscribers have HD and/or DVR boxes, or approximately 36.3 per cent of its subscriber base. Penetration remains low at predominantly smaller market cable systems; MAGNA estimates only 17.4 per cent of Charter’s subscriber base has DVRs as of Q3 ‘10.
– At Mediacom, management recently stated that 44 per cent of the company’s digital subscribers have HD and/or DVR boxes, approximately 26.2 per cent of their total subscriber base. They estimate that only 18 per cent of Mediacom’s subscribers have DVR services.
Global DVR international subscription growth details:
– The leading market for DVRs –and on-demand content deployments –outside of the US remains the UK. With DVR penetration rates exceeding 70 per cent at Sky and approaching 30 per cent at Virgin, the two companies’ VOD services are also growing. Virgin announced that it delivered 73 million VOD views per month during Q3, to 59 per cent (or 2.8 million) of its subscribers, equating to an average of 33 views per user per month in the quarter, up from 31 in Q2 ‘10 (the company reported 73 million video on demand views to its 3.7 million digital video subscribers). Unable to offer the same technological solution for VOD, towards the end of 2010 Sky began to phase the roll-out of Anytime+, expanding on its existing Anytime “push-VOD” offering to consumers with Sky’s broadband connections integrated into their set-top boxes. The new service –similar to DirecTV’s DirecTV Cinema–offers access via the Internet to hundreds of content assets for on-demand retrieval.