U.S. VOD viewing up 59%
By Danny King -- Video Business, 5/27/2008
MAY 28 | Video-on-demand viewing, both free and paid for, surged during the first quarter as more kids shows, primetime series and movies became available.
U.S. VOD viewing jumped 59% to 185 million hours from a year earlier, on a 36% increase in programming to more than 70,000 titles, Rentrak Corp. said this week.
Viewing of free on-demand TV shows roughly doubled, while subscription VOD viewing rose 41% and transactional viewing rose 11% from a year earlier, said Rentrak, which culled data from 51 million U.S. set-top boxes.
Multichannel operators such as cable, satellite and fiber-optic services are competing for customers by boosting inventory of standard- and high-definition content, ranging from kids’ shows to recently released movies. U.S. cable leader Comcast, in response to satellite leader DirecTV’s boast of having the most linear high-def channels, in January launched a video-on-demand service that it said will have an inventory of more than 1,000 show and film choices a month by the end of the year.
“The operators and studios have been doing an excellent job of promoting the availability of movies on demand, thus increasing awareness and traffic in this category,” said Kristie Fortner, VP of syndication at Rentrak.
Consulting firm Oliver Wyman forecasts that high-def VOD will generate $5 billion to $10 billion in consumer spending by 2010.
Television-service operators and movie studios also have narrowed the time gap for many newer films between when they’re released on DVD and when they start airing on video-on-demand.
Fortner said Rentrak didn't break out data relating to how the narrowing of the film-release window may have affected how many titles were purchased for VOD.
