Tuesday, November 9, 2010

NZ online TV viewing

Last week I presented a NZ digital landscape document, and as I was working through the data, and developing my notes for year on year comparisons, I came across a really interesting (but in hindsight not suprising) piece of data.


According to Roy Morgan research, 8.3% of NZ'ers aged 14+ streamed TV in August 2010. Whilst this doesn't tell us how they were using it (catch up versus choice) and for how long, it now moves the online TV viewing well along the 'early adopter' category. Online TV streaming has experienced growth of 113% over the past 12 months, up from 3.9% of NZ'ers aged 14+ in September 2009 and is great news for the TV networks.


Drilling further provides more insight however, with significant demographic skews - nearly 20% of all 14-24 year olds, both male and female, watch TV online. This is significant, espectially in the fragmented youth TV audience space and the percentage drops as the age groups increase. I'd guess that the younger age groups are also the ones who are able to correctly identify watching TV online and viewing video online (e.g. YouTube). As the age groups increase, the skew towards males becomes marked.





With recent innovations from TVNZ towards their ondemand platform, and the recent upgrade to the TV3 media player, New Zealand now has high quality video distribution platforms. Of course, iSky is launching sometime within the next few weeks also.


Combining this usage data with the ever increasing broadband speeds should be positive news for the TV networks. However the current cost discrepancy between broadcast and online TV (despite the platform nuances) will continue to hold back significant investment.

If all movies had smartphones

This is a clever video on the College Humor website - rewriting the plotlines to a few classic movies if smartphones had been available.





Hat-tip to the Futurelab blog