Showing more signs that authentication issues are getting ironed out as pay TV viewers migrate to new platforms, TV Everywhere viewing climbed 102% in the fourth quarter of 2015 versus the year-ago period,  according to Adobe Digital Index's latest Digital Video Benchmark Report.

Adobe’s study, based on 3.6 billion TV Everywhere authentications across more than 300 TVE Web sites and apps, also found that “active” TVE users rose 22% on a quarter-over-quarter basis.

On a genre basis, broadcast and cable content (regular episodic content) saw the greatest rate of TVE growth, at 11% year-over-year, versus movies (89%), sports (80%), and teens and toons (61%).

“This is the first time we've seen that, and we think it’s because of some of these fall TV premieres and people waiting to watch when it’s most convenient for them instead of when it broadcasts on the actual cable channel,” Becky Tasker, managing analyst at Adobe Digital Index, said in a statement.

Adobe’s study also looked at device-level trends and found that iOS-based platforms still get the bulk of TVE authentications, but are ceding ground to Roku players and other TV-connected platforms.

iOS enjoyed a 36% share of TVE authentications by access type in Q4 2015, but its share dropped 20% year-over-year. Browser-based TV authentications were flat, at 18%, compared to  Android (18%, up 3%) and TV-connected devices (21%, up 16%).

Roku’s TVE share rose 14% QoQ, and Adobe credited that in part to the addition of major broadcast channels to the platform in mid-November 2015. 

TV Everywhere viewing is still on the rise, but the rate of growth has slowed considerably, according to Adobe Digital Index’s latestUS Digital Video Benchmark report (PDF)

Authenticated TVE viewing was up 63% year-over-year, Adobe found in the report, which based its findings on 159 billion online video starts and 1.49 billion TVE authentications from Q2 2014 to Q2 2015. As a point of comparison, TVE usage skyrocketed 246%, when Adobe posted similar year-on-year results for Q1 2013 through Q1 2014. 

“What we’re starting to see is that potentially some of the friction in the process of setting up TV Everywhere or figuring out which device you want to use might be starting to cause a slowdown,”  Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst for ADI, said in a statement. “We think generally the demand is there, but we may have reached a tipping point where to get to the next level it needs to be simpler to sign in.”

ADI also found that 12.7% of pay TV viewers were watching content on their devices in Q2 2015, a 19% year-over-year gain, but down 4% from Q1 2015.

According to the report, the iPad was the top device used for TVE, with about 22% of users tapping in via Apple’s iconic tablet. That was followed by PCs (18.3%), the iPhone (18.2%), the Apple TV (12.8%), Android devices (9.1%), Macs (7.4%), Roku (6.8%), gaming consoles (2%), Amazon Fire TV (1%), and smart TVs (0.7%).

Apple devices alone accounted for up to 61% of TVE viewing, possibly paving the way for “an all-in-one solution from Apple,” she noted.  A new, more capable iteration of the Apple TV is expected to be announced next week.

“It doesn’t take much for something to come along that makes everything so much easier to use that adoption goes into a hockey-stick pattern,” Gaffney said. “That could very well happen. That’s what happened with the iPhone.”

Looking beyond TVE, the primary vehicle for watching TV sites is the PC, as the platform averaged 1.68 starts per month, versus .44 for smartphones, and 0.94 for tablets.