Jim (as Dwight): "Question, which kind of bear is best?"

Dwight: "That's a ridiculous question."

Jim: "False! Black Bear."

Certainly, just like this classic scene featuring the always clever Jim Halpert and his top trolling target, Dwight Schrute, from The Office, the title "which OTT platform is best" is, well, debatable. But there are a heck of a lot more than "basically just two schools of thought" on the matter. And that's probably because there are dozens of research companies out there right now trying to make their dimes with fresh analytical takes on the video streaming business. 

Color us blurry-eyed ... and maybe a bit too cynical at this late-Thursday hour. But is it not ridiculous to compare YouTube and Netflix based on the number of users who access the platform at least once a month? Maybe there's a business case, beyond eMarketer's own bottom line, we're not seeing with this. Heck, we're still in AAA trade journalism, after all. 

Here is eMarketer's comparative analysis.

Plying data to showcase the palpable consumer demand for discounted, partially ad-supported tiers of popular subscription VOD services, 28% of HBO Max subscribers surveyed in April by Hub Research said they take the cheaper $9.99-a-month version of the service. 

The response from 1,600 adult U.S. consumers is notable, because HBO Max just launched its discounted tier in June of last year. (It charges $14.99 for the premium ad-free HBO Max experience.) 

So in just around 10 months, the option went from zero to being the choice of around 30% of HBO subscribers. Five percent of respondents said they don’t know which iteration of HBO service they have. 

The percentage of overall user base taking the cheaper ad-supported option is much higher for services that launched with these options baked in, such as Hulu, Peacock, Paramount Plus and Discovery Plus. 

Only 23% of Peacock users say they pay for the $9.99 premium no-ad experience, for example. 

The data comes as the two biggest operatives in the SVOD market, Netflix and Disney Plus, are rushing to get to the market with cheaper ad-based service plans. 

A month ago, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released an annual report projecting that U.S. connected TV advertising revenue would increase 39% this year to $21.2 billion.

This week, eMarketer crunched some of IAB’s data into what it means for U.S. video advertising market share. And, no surprise here, connected TV and other digital advertising platforms, including social video, are seeing significantly bigger pieces of the pie, all at the expense of linear TV. 

In 2022, linear TV will account for just 57% of U.S. video advertising spending, eMarketer projects, down from 62% in 2021 and 71% in 2020. 

CTV advertising, meanwhile, will see its market share increase to 18% this year, up from 15% in 2021 and 11% in 2020. 

The “other” category, which includes things like social video, will go from 18% market share to 25% over the same two-year span. ■

Even though TV watching has been up in 2020, when it comes to pay-TV subscriptions the numbers are historic in the wrong kind of way. According to a report from eMarketer, cable, satellite and telecom TV providers are on pace to lose the most subscribers ever in a single year in 2020.

By the end of the year, eMarketer is projecting that 31.2 million U.S. households will have cut the cable cord in aggregate. In addition, 6.6 million households are expected to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions. Projecting down the road, eMarketer estimates that a third of U.S. households will have cut the pay-TV cord by 2024.

This brings the total number of U.S. households with cable, satellite or telecom TV packages down to 77.6 million, down 7.5% year-over-year, the biggest drop ever, per eMarketer.

“Consumers are choosing to cut the cord because of high prices, especially compared with streaming alternatives,” said Eric Haggstrom, eMarketer forecasting analyst at Insider Intelligence. “The loss of live sports in H1 2020 contributed to further declines. While sports have returned, people will not return to their old cable or satellite plans.”

In relation to the loss of subscribers is a drop in traditional TV ad spending. eMarketer projects that the total ad spend for traditional TV in 2020 will be $60 billion, representing a 15% drop year-over-year and the lowest total since 2011. There is expected to be some rebound in 2021, but eMarketer estimates that TV ad spending will remain below pre-pandemic spending until at least 2024.

Haggstrom forecasts that ad spending will instead shift to digital video.

For more information, visit eMarketer’s full report.

This story originally appeared in Next TV sibling publication TV Technology.

Hulu’s two-year-old virtual pay TV service has 2 million subscribers and is currently driving an industry-leading annual revenue of more than $1 billion.

That’s the claim made by eMarketer, which has some rather interesting projections, estimates—and outright wild guesses?—in its latest report, “US Subscription Video Landscape 2019: Bracing for an Onslaught of New Services.”

In its report, the research company looks at the entire flora and fauna of U.S. SVOD and live streaming platforms. In its rankings on the vMVPD sector, eMarketer concedes that its revenue figures do not include advertising—a nascent but growing part of the business for operators like Hulu.

The data seems somewhat sound—it is largely accepted that Hulu Plus Live TV ranks somewhere between the publicly traded likes of Dish Network’s Sling TV and AT&T’s DirecTV Now.

Other figures are slightly more illuminating. For example, the research firm estimates that Sony PlayStation Vue has around 800,000 users after four years on the market. YouTube TV, which launched around the same time as Hulu With Live TV, is at around 1 million customers, eMarketer said. 

U.S. advertising revenue generated by over-the-top video streaming will grow by around 20% to $2.6 billion, according to an estimate released by the Winterberry Group.

The increase will mark a significant deceleration for OTT advertising, which grew by 42.2% in 2018.

Meanwhile, the decline of linear TV is accelerating, but not that quickly. The sector will recede by 1% in 2019, according to Winterberry, to about $69.2 billion.

Putting the research into context with its own data, eMarketer suggests that measurement is all that stands in the way of OTT claiming a significantly greater share of ad dollars from linear.

Culling survey data from Kagan, eMarketer noted that among pay TV providers, media owners and advertisers, over-the-top delivery is more “valued” over linear in almost every context—from quality of data to demographics to reach to overall quality of experience.

One of the few remaining areas in which linear has the edge is measurement.

“Traditional TV measurement gives advertisers and their agencies a comprehensive view of households and audience composition across hundreds of linear TV channels,” said Randy Cooke, VP of enterprise solutions at SpotX, to eMarketer. “But OTT content is vastly more diverse than linear TV, and ad opportunities only exist where consumers stream content.”

Ad spending on digital video is burgeoning, and Facebook, along with its Instagram platform, control about a quarter of the action.

That’s the conclusion of the latest eMarketer report, which estimated that U.S. ad spending on digital video will grow about 30% this year to $27.82 billion. And Facebook will control 24.5% of that overall spend with video ad revenue of $6.81 billion.

That figure represents 87% of overall digital video ad spending on social media platforms, Snapchat and Twitter included.

It also surpasses the estimated $3.36 billion YouTube will generate in U.S. ad spending, which represents 17% growth.

Related: Facebook Stock Plunges After Revenue Miss

“In-feed video has been a successful ad format for both Facebook and Instagram,” eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in a statement. “Marketers rely on in-feed video ads to capture users’ attention and build brand awareness. A newer video ad format, in-stream advertising in Facebook Watch shows, is still relatively new, but we think advertisers will increase their usage of it because it is similar to linear TV advertising.”

While Twitter and Snapchat control only a small portion of U.S. video ad money, they both have a growth trajectory to report.

Snapchat controls only round 5.1% of U.S. dollars spend on social video, but its revenue from the category will increase 19% to $397.3 million in 2018, eMarketer projects.

Twitter, meanwhile, controls about 8.1% of social video spending, and will see its revenue from the category grow by 12% to $633.3 million.

Overall, video now makes up about a quarter of all digital ad spending, eMarketer said. 

Thanks to increased multitasking, American are now consuming media for more than 12 hours per day, with nearly half that time spent on digital platforms, according an eMarketer report published Oct. 9.

“U.S. Time Spent With Media: eMarketer’s Updated Estimates for 2017” calculates that U.S. adults will spend 12 hours and 1 minute daily with major media this year, with TV viewing accounting for only 3 hours 58 minutes of the total. The total media time per person (over age 18) in 2017 is two minutes per day higher than in 2016 and 24 minutes more than in 2012, according to the study.

The growing use of mobile devices represents more than one-quarter of total media time, according to the research group, which observed that "people have become more efficient at multitasking."

Related: Study: 85% of Internet Users Surf While Watching TV

eMarketer's methodology tallies the minutes of use, no matter whether a person is focused on one platform or is simultaneously using multiple devices. Its analysis concluded that "total media consumption time continues to grow, even as the number of hours in a day remains the same."

In the "digital" category, American spend 3 hours 17 minutes on mobile devices (not including voice conversations); two hours, 3 minutes on desktops and laptops; and 31 minutes on "other connected devices," such as tablets, eMarketer found.

"Multitasking via mobile is primarily responsible for the overall increase in time spent with media," the report said. "Consumers are spending more of their time on mobile devices conducting attention-heavy activities like video viewing and mobile gaming, but also with less visual activities like audio listening that enable continuous media intake."

Radio attracts 1 hour, 26 minutes of Americans' daily attention, and print media gets 24 minutes, according to the study.

"The amount of attention that an individual can provide to media has its limits, though, and growth is slowing," eMarketer's report continued. "Time spent with mobile non-voice will rise by 12 minutes in 2017, and will be offset by declines in time spent with desktops/laptops, print, radio and — most of all — TV."

Although eMarketer expects that "TV will remain the most time-consuming traditional medium" for adults, it points out that the 3 hour, 58 minutes daily dose of all TV now is down seven minutes from last year, and is significantly lower that eMarketer's previously published forecast of 4 hours, 19 minutes per day.

The amount of time TV viewers spend on mobile devices while they’re watching continues to broaden, further fragmenting the attention of the audience, according to a new study from eMarketer.

Nearly 85% of Internet users surf the Web on a mobile device while they’re watching TV at least once per month, up from 80.3% in 2015 and 75.6% in 2014, eMarketer found in its latest study on the topic. The research firm also predicts that the number will rise to about 88% in 2017, and almost 92% in 2018.

Among other findings, eMarketer said smartphones are now the device of choice for this group of multitaskers, with 146.9 million Americans poised this year to browse the web or use internet-connected apps on their phone (including chat apps) while they watch TV.

Notably, just 25.5% of simultaneous media users are consuming related content online while watching TV, according to the study.

eMarketer said this multitasking trend is also growing amid a small but increasing market of cord-cutters. This year, the firm expects to see cord-cutters grow 15.7%, causing the number of total pay TV viewers to drop 0.6%, or by 1.3 million, from last year.

As virtual reality platforms for the high, middle and lower ends of the market continue to enter the market, there’s still an ongoing debate about what kind of content will resonate in these immersive environments.

Though we’re still at the front edge of the market, a new study from Futuresource Consulting (surfaced here by eMarketer) that tabulated data from about 3,000 consumers  in the U.S. and Western  Europe found that 39% were most interested in watching or experiencing VR movies, followed closely by games (38%), TV/music videos (27%), educational content (26%) and sports (26%).  Futuresource Consulting also sees the consumer VR content market reaching $8.3 billion by 2020.

Those results speak well to the focus of next-gen VR platforms, such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony’s PlayStation VR, which will hook into PlayStation 4 consoles. The closeness in those results should also be good news for programmers and studios that are pursuing the VR angle, including Discovery, Fox Sports, SyFy, as well as relative newcomers such as Baobab Studios, which is coming off a $6 million “A” round led by Comcast Ventures.

In other findings (also surfaced by eMarketer), Greenlight VR and Touchstone Research discovered that 79% of Gen Z (aged 10-17) U.S. Internet users were the most interested in VR, followed by Millennials (73%), Gen X (70%), and Baby Boomers (64%).

For a deeper dive into the reality surrounding the emerging world of VR, please join me on Wednesday (February 24) at 2 p.m. for an interactive, 60-minute webinar on the topic (registration is $199) with four experts and innovators in the field:  Joel Espelien, Senior Analyst, The Diffusion Group (TDG); Tony Mugavero, founder and CEO, Littlstar; Andrew Trickett, co-founder, Merge VR; and Maureen Fan,  CEO, Baobab Studios.

U.S. broadband users continue to gravitate to OTT services, threatening to saturate the market, but there’s still room to grow for several players in the sector, eMarketer found in a new forecast -- Q4 2015 State of Video: Monetization, Audience, Platforms and Content.

Led by usage of YouTube, about 72.1% of U.S. Internet subs, or 199.6 million of them, will tap into OTT video services by 2019, up from 69.7%/181 million at the end of 2015, the firm predicts.

In the bigger picture view, eMarketer believes there will be 187.8 million YouTube users in the U.S. by 2019, up from 170.7 million at the end of 2014. Likewise, the firm predicts there will be 143.0 million Netflix users in the U.S. by 2019, up from 114.3 million in 2015. By 2019, there will be 88.6 Amazon OTT users (versus 65.2 million this year), and 82.2 million Hulu users (up from 59.9 million in 2015).

Among that group, Hulu’s expected to see the greatest user growth (4.3%) by 2019, followed by Amazon (4.1%), Netflix (2.6%) and YouTube (1.6%).  By  2019, YouTube will maintain its lead from a user penetration standpoint (94.1%), ahead of Netflix (71.7%), Amazon (44.4%), and Hulu (41.2%).

“There is little if any room for YouTube to grow beyond this near saturation, but other leading services will undergo significant growth over the next several years,” eMarketer noted. The expected growth rate of other services, “indicate that US OTT usage is on a sharp growth trajectory, even factoring out YouTube.”

Among other predictions, eMarketer said 89.3% of U.S. digital viewers will watch video via OTT, up from 88.6% in 205.

And while game consoles will lead the connected TV category over smart TVs and Blu-ray players this year, their share will continue to erode, with streaming sticks – led by Google’s Chromecast – becoming the second-most pervasive connected TV device, eMarketer said.