Comcast, Nielsen: VOD Doesn’t Hurt TV
By Linda Moss -- Multichannel News, 2/9/2006 12:36:00 PM
The growing use of video-on-demand doesn’t appear to reduce traditional TV viewing, according to a research report released Thursday by Comcast Corp. and Nielsen Media Research.
The results of a three-month joint study of VOD users in Philadelphia indicated that at this juncture, households that watch VOD are already heavy TV viewers, and there is no evidence that using VOD diminishes the amount of regular TV watching they do.
The study, presented by Nielsen at the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing’s On-Demand Consortium, marks the first time Nielsen has used aggregated, anonymous VOD-usage information supplied by a third party and merged it with audience data collected by Nielsen meters in its participating sample households.
For the study, Nielsen merged and analyzed Comcast VOD-usage data and Nielsen sample data from the same households in Philadelphia that were both Comcast Digital Cable customers and participants in Nielsen’s “Local People Meter” sample.
The study was based on about 180 households, and it was conducted from June-August.
Nielsen and Comcast used encryption protocols to protect the privacy of Comcast subscribers and the identity of Nielsen LPM homes in Philadelphia.
“This study confirms that VOD complements the traditional TV-viewing experience,” Comcast senior vice president and general manager of video services Page Thompson said in a prepared statement. “In addition to watching programming not available on traditional TV, customers are using VOD to learn about shows they may not have seen before or to ‘catch up’ on past episodes of series they’ve missed.”
On Wednesday, Comcast and Nielsen Entertainment announced an agreement in which the nation’s largest cable operator agreed to conduct a trial of Nielsen’s new on-demand-measurement service.
According to the study, 75% of homes with access to VOD used it at least once during the three-month period. Households that tuned to Comcast’s On Demand service watched traditional TV for an average of 723 minutes per day, 9% higher than all digital-cable households and 38% higher than all cable households.
The study also found that the VOD audience is a younger viewership, and that free VOD was the most-sampled VOD content, viewed by about 42% of VOD homes during the survey. However, subscription VOD -- like services offered by Home Box Office and Showtime Networks Inc. -- accounted for the most minutes of viewing, 54%.
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