Nielsen Study Shows 40.3% Of American Households Have Access To An SVOD Service

A recent report from Nielsen revealed a load of good news for streaming video-on-demand companies. The television rating and analytics firm, who has recently tried focusing more on digital metrics, found in its 2014 Q4 Total Audience Audience Report that 40.3% of U.S. households now have access to SVOD services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime.

Nielsen noted the 40.3% SVOD access figure was more than a 4% jump from 2013’s Q4 number of 36%. The ratings company broke down the findings even more, and discovered that of those Americans who have streaming video access, 9.9% of them use two services. Netflix accounts for 36% of the SVOD market share, with Amazon Prime coming in at 13% and Hulu Plus at 6.5%.

Streaming households are more likely to boast a range of devices to watch the video content; for example, 65% of these households own tablets as opposed to just 47% of traditional TV-only households. Wider access to streaming devices seems to have upped the amount of time SVOD access households watch streaming video content each day (just 15 minutes shy of three hours) as compared to their traditional TV counterparts (who only watch an hour and 57 minutes).

Another interesting angle to come out of Nielsen’s Total Audience Report for Q4 2014 is what the demographics of SVOD households look like. For income, these homes tend to bring in an average of over $74,000

a year, whereas households with traditional TV access earn roughly $50,000. Additionally, 45% of SVOD access households also have children under the roof, as opposed to only 35% of traditional TV households. And unsurprisingly, 25% of households with access to streaming video services consist of people 35 and younger (only 11% of SVOD consumers are 65 or older).

Nielsen’s Senior Vice President of Insights Dounia Turrill noted in the Total Audience Report introduction how increasing consumer use of SVOD means content creators have more opportunities to produce programming. But she said not all companies have the resources or financial means to delve into digital.

“With continued and accelerating fragmentation, the risks and rewards are potentially high, and the ability to stake a claim in the expanding industry pie is central to companies’ growth,” Turrill wrote. “The landscape has created new competitors—akin to a modern day gold rush—for traditional video and audio, with the emergence of a relatively small number of digital leaders, all of whom are looking not just to compete, but to stake a claim and prosper in that space.”

You can sign up on Nielsen’s site to download the entire 2014 Q4 Total Audience Report for yourself.