Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. News

New Nielsen study on streaming points to more bad news for traditional TV

Christine Persaud
By

Watching Netflix
The shift from pay TV to streaming continues as the latest Nielsen Total Audience report for Q2 confirms that the number of homes who only pay for broadband Internet is rising while the number of homes with pay-TV subscriptions is on the decline, reports Broadcast Cable.

According to the data, broadband-only homes are up by 52 percent to 3.3 million from 2.2 million year over year. Meanwhile, pay-TV subscriptions are down 1.2 percent to 100.4 million, from 101.6 million at this time last year. And while 1.2 percent may not seem like much, that million plus decline has caused all sorts of havoc on the stock market, with big media companies like Viacom, Nickelodeon, Disney, and many others seeing tumbling stock prices in recent weeks.

Related Videos

The latest findings echo a study last month from Strategy Analytics which found that pay-TV services reported subscriber losses of 479,000 in the U.S. from April-June of this year, calling it the “highest rate” they’d seen thus far.

Related

Still, while the writing has been on the while for some time, many have said the stock market shifts have been largely unwarranted. As has always been the case with such figures, you can only infer so much from the data, and much is left up to interpretation.

For example, the study also found that subscription video-on-demand rose by 18 percent to 45 percent, and more people have smart TVs in the home, which afford easy access to streaming services (up to 18 percent from 11 percent). Is streaming TV replacing traditional TV? Or is streaming TV influencing people to, in fact, watch more TV altogether? What’s more, with viewership on computers and mobile devices on the rise, there’s a lot of viewing going on that Neilsen’s data may not actually tabulate, or at least accurately incorporate into the data.

Bottom line: people are watching plenty of TV, in plenty of ways. The tide seems to be shifting toward streaming services more and more. How this might impact pay-TV and traditional linear TV in the long run – well, we’ll just have to wait and see. HBO certainly understands, having launched its HBO Now streaming service to capture some of the lost pay-TV revenue. Will others follow suit? Partner up? And how will this impact the bottom line?

Only time will tell. But pay-TV subscribers would probably be best to take a note from HBO’s book and get on that over-the-top (OTT) TV bandwagon before there’s no room left.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Sling TV just got even more affordable with new discounts on some Extra packages
sling tv discounts extras packages new ui roku 3

Sling TV was the first major live TV streaming service to launch, and even as competitors like PlayStation Vue and DirecTV Now have come along, it has remained the most affordable. Now customers will get even more channels for their money with the service’s new "4 Extras Deal," announced in a blog post on Friday.

While other streaming services aim to provide an experience very much like cable or satellite providers, from the beginning Sling has embraced a more modular approach, with small base packages augmented by Extras packages. The 4 Extras Deal offers four of the service’s most popular Extras packages for half of what they originally cost.

Read more
AT&T caters to cord-cutters with plans to add 3 new DirecTV streaming options
fios adds mobile dvr playback on the go cheesy streaming couple

Smaller cable packages — or none at all — have become more popular with Americans as consumers increasingly look to pay for only what they actually want to watch. Given the change, it's not surprising that multiple companies — even steadfast cable and satellite companies — are hoping to snatch up some of the cord-cutter crowd. Now, AT&T has announced that it will introduce three new options for streaming DirecTV video content in late 2016.

Related: Sign up for Sling TV today and get a $50 off an Amazon Fire TV

Read more
Nielsen report shows many Americans see no point in paying for music streaming
nielsen report many americans find music streaming too expensive services generated a third of all revenue in first half 2015

It may seem that nobody buys music anymore, opting for streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music instead, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is happy to pay the monthly fee for streaming. Nielsen’s 2015 End Of Year Music Report (available as a PDF) shows that nearly half of Americans don’t see the point of paying for a streaming service.

Nielsen surveyed 3,000 music listeners in the U.S. and asked them about their music habits. When asked how likely they were to subscribe to a music streaming service in the next six months, only nine percent said they were “very likely” or “somewhat likely.” 13 percent chose that they were “neither likely nor unlikely,” while 78 percent of those surveyed said that they were “somewhat unlikely” or “very unlikely” to subscribe.

Read more