Online video only 2.5% of traditional TV
June 7, 2011
TV Genius believes there are a lot of signs that the Internet isn’t killing TV at all – but actually making it better.
Alongside the YouTube phenomenon, Netflix is also reporting substantial growth and their movie and TV show streaming service, and now accounts for 22 per cent of North American internet bandwidth (YouTube is 8 per cent). While their $7.99/month service is popular, it’s difficult to see how it’s going to be able to grow dramatically without substantial investment in upgrading the core Internet infrastructure, and that’s unlikely to be funded purely by movie rentals.
And this leads to the core issue of TV Genius’ report: TV services rely on massive penetration and create large communities around events scheduled at the same time every week. Recent research has shown that UK users watch 11,000 years of online video per month. This seems intimidating until you do the math- this only 6 minutes of video per day, compared to 3 hours of TV viewing.
Unless the available bandwidth on the Internet is going to increase tenfold, Internet services are always going to compliment TV, not replace it – as evidenced in people’s usage of the BBC’s iPlayer, where 93 per cent of people claim to watch online because they missed a show on broadcast.