Internet TV viewing continues to increase in popularity and there's a new study out there to prove it. According to comScore, viewing between October 2005 and March 2006 is up a full 18 percent.
The analysis showed that in March, U.S. viewers alone watched a total of 3.7 billion video streams for an average of 100 minutes of viewing per month, per user. Back in October, the time was only 85 percent.
The trend in watching is pretty closely split between men and women, too. Men started about 52 percent of the streams, while women fell in at 48 percent. The largest viewer group, however, was men 18 to 34, who watched an average of 140 minutes per month.
But while certain demographic sets consume more video than others, the report's biggest surprise is that people from all ages and walks of life are eating it up, according to Erin Hunter, comsCore's EVP of media and entertainment."There are skews by age, but there isn't any group that's not doing it," she said. "It's not just college kids. It's also the older demographic, and clearly it's males and females both. In terms of content, we see entertainment and sports and news all with pretty strong rates of viewership."
The numbers come from comScore's technology to track viewers along with a panel of 1.5 million Internet users. A smaller subset was used to draw the video data numbers.
The question that comes to mind is almost like which came first, the chicken or the egg. Is viewing up because there are more users checking it out? Or, is it because there's so much new content out there to check out.
The Internet was once the almost exclusive domain of iTunes when it came to legal viewing. Now, it's home to an array of viewing services like ABC, MTV Overdrive, MoboVivo; the list goes on and continues to get better.
Next year's numbers will be very interesting to see.
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