The number of U.S. TV homes with at least one internet-connected TV device continues to swing upward, Leichtman Research Group found in a new study.

Some 74% of those homes have at least one such device in a category that includes smart TVs, standalone streaming players, streaming adapters and sticks, and connected Blu-ray players, LRG said in the study, Connected and 4K TVs XV, which based findings on a survey of 1,202 U.S. TV homes.

The 2018 results are up from 65% in LRG’s 2016 study, 44% in 2013, and a mere 24% in 2010.

LRG said 29% of adults in U.S. TV homes watch video on a TV via a connected device daily, up from 19% in 2016, 6% in 2013, and 1% in 2010.

Tying into a broader trend that has seen younger viewers gravitate to OTT-delivered video, that group currently over-indexes in the 18-34 age group (43%), compared to 33% who are 35-54, and 12% among those 55 years or older.

Per the study, about 29% of all TVs in U.S. homes are connected smart TVs, up from just 7% in 2014. Among homes with any connected TV device, 57% have three or more, with a mean of 3.8 devices per connected TV home.

Across all TV homes, the mean number of connected TV devices is 2.8, versus a mean of 1.7 pay TV set-top boxes per U.S. TV home

“Connected TVs, along with Netflix and other SVOD services, are among the biggest factors driving change in the video industry over the past few years,” Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, said in a statement. “In a short period of time, connected devices have allowed an increasing number of consumers to easily watch SVOD and other video options on the same TV screen as traditional pay-TV and broadcast offerings."

As promised, Caavo on Wednesday (February 14) opened up sales of a new TV-connected device equipped with a voice remote and software and a UI that can command and control a wide variety of other devices, including streaming players, set-top boxes, MVPD-supplied set-tops and gaming consoles.

RELATED: Caavo’s Smart Universal TV Device Controller Starts Shipping February 14

Caavo has limited the initial run to 5,000 units, selling them for $399 each. That “Deluxe Set” includes a customizable top-case (offered in three wood-grain finishes), lifetime service, as well as cloth-covered HDMI and Ethernet cables, HDMI extender and IR accessories.

The Caavo device is equipped with eight HDMI ports that can connect to other TV-connected devices, and uses a lightweight client to detect them and then tie them together with a unified interface.

Instead of requiring the user to toggle manually between separate devices to hunt down what they are looking for, Caavo strives to be smart enough to bring them all together on a single platform and experience, allowing a user, for example, to search for and access a show or movie from individual apps or from a recording made to a local DVR from any of the various devices that are connected to Caavo.

RELATED: Caavo’s Pitch: One Device to Rule Them All

Caavo, a CE company that includes the late Blake Krikorian among its co-founders, has raised about $32.5 million.

Initial product reviews of Caavo are a bit mixed, as most pointed to the device’s current lack of support for high dynamic range. Here’s a snapshot from three of them:

-Caavo “is like a little TV butler,”The Verge’s Nilay Patel explained, noting that Caavo can help build watchlists based on what services they subscribe to (Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, etc.). Though he sees Caavo as a great idea, it’s also a product “that needs a little more polish.”

“After using a review unit for several days, it’s clear that Caavo has the most interesting idea about the future of remote controls anyone’s had in years. It’s also clear that it’s a very complicated, expensive idea that isn’t quite ready yet.”

Patel set up Caavo with a TiVo Roamio Pro, an Xbox One, a Chromecast and Apple TV, and said it took him about 20 minutes to get it all connected and running.

He said the biggest limitation was no support for HDR Caavo does support 4K today, but told Patel that there isn’t a chipset it can use to support both in an eight-port HDMI setup.

-CNET’s David Katzmaier gave Caavo an overall score of 6.9. While giving Caavo high marks for its unique universal remote control and HDMI switching system, he said the product’s lack of support for HDR, Dolby Vision and  Dolby Atmos “is unforgivable for a product this expensive.”

It also took him a couple of hours to get the system up and running with source devices that included a Verizon Fios HD DVR, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Roku Ultra, Amazon Fire TV, Nvidia Shield, Apple TV 4K, Oppo Blu-ray player, an Onkyo receiver.

“The Caavo's setup is as easy as it can be for a complex home-theater system, but that doesn't mean it's fast,” he noted.

He also noted that cheaper options such as the Logitech Harmony hubs and hub/remote combos also do a good job for consumers who find themselves “juggling multiple remotes.” He was likewise hopeful that a next version from Caavo would be less expensive “perhaps less visual flair” and support for HDR. “If that happens, Harmony will have a problem on its hands.”

-Wired’s Jeffrey Van Camp gave Caavo a rating of 7 out of 10, calling it the “ultimate universal TV remote,” but lamented that setup “can be laborious and frustrating, depending on your devcies.”

Though Caavo’s price isn't right for everyone, Camp said he’s the “ideal customer for Caavo,” given that he has at least a half dozen remotes and game controllers strewn about.

Some things were hit and miss. His Roku set up fine, but the Fire TV did not. He also ran into some trouble integrating his Sonus sound bar.

“For all its proposed convenience, it’s clear that Caavo is still a very new, beta product that looks more elegant than it works (at least, for now),” he wrote, later bringing up its lack of support for HDR and Dolby Atmos as a significant shortcoming, as well as its inability to deeplink into apps on a game console.

But had liked Caavo’s voice recognition system and said the product “switches between devices better than anything I’ve ever used.”

“Setting up the Caavo could be a lot easier, to put it mildly, but for me the juice was worth the squeeze,” Van Camp noted in the review wrap up.

A major challenge that programmers and other content players face is how to reach a wide range of mobile and TV-connected screens without having to reinvent the technology for each platform.

One company that has stepped into that breach is You.i TV, an Ottawa, Canada-based firm that has developed a unified codebase that helps its partners extend a bridge to iOS and Android smartphones and tablets and PlayStation and Xbox consoles, as well as Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, and Fire TV devices, and even certain smart-TV platforms.

You.i TV, which counts Time Warner Investments among its top financial backers and Turner as a key client, is also baked into a direct-to-consumer platform for content providers developed by Comcast Technology Solutions.

Related: You.i TV Aims to Streamline Video’s Shift to Multiple Screens

Next TV editor Jeff Baumgartner recently spoke with Jason Flick, You.i TV’s CEO, about how the company helps partners deal with the ongoing device fragmentation challenge. An edited transcript follows.

NTV:What are your top priorities for the rest of 2017 for the business itself or at the product level?
Jason Flick: The goal is still this glass-first approach, helping our customers that own all the services [reach] the platforms that they need to get to. Scaling the business is still our top priority.

The other area that’s interesting for this year is about monetization. If we’re presenting ourselves as owning the glass for them and building that layer that customers interact with, one of the big things is monetization — TVOD [transactional video-on-demand], SVOD [subscription VOD], AVOD [advertising VOD]. Is it about selling subscriptions or selling tickets? We’ve done [work with] sporting teams where their main focus is on tickets. How that money flows is changing drastically and quickly.

Related is collecting the data piece. We collect data pre-normalized … but you have to be able to action it somehow, and we let them consistently do that.

NTV:Explain how you can support a wide range of screen types and platforms using a single codebase? How do you go about finding the similarities between them while adapting for the technical nuances?
JF: Fundamentally, the way we’ve done it, the OS [operating system] is used to abstract the hardware because it’s so fragmented today. The hardware under the hood is identical everywhere and the OSs are causing a fragmentation. We wrote the lion’s share of an OS. That’s how we’re able to get on every [platform].

There are differences for sure. Xbox is a good example. They have a snap-to grid mode, so we automatically do a best-effort snap-to grid for your app, so you don’t have to do anything.

But our code and your code complies natively on every platform, just like video games do. If there are new things available — Apple gives you exclusive access — and we predominantly deal with the tier ones, so they are getting this early access to features on the platform. You are natively running on that platform, so they can still make all of those calls.

We also talk directly to their stack … and that gets us our performance and that gets us our cross-platform. We’re really a graphics layer.

NTV:Your approach reminds me a bit of the notion of middleware in the old set-top box world. Is that a fair characterization?
JF: Middleware is a bit of a dated term. I view it a bit differently. The media companies that come to us are saying we need to own the stack. They are going to build the stack with the encoding and their authentication and they’ll collect the data. Data is huge now.

I view us as that last piece of the stack. If you want to own the stack, we’re that last mile that no one thought you could really have a stack, and yet we’ve done it. Getting the same codebase on almost 11 platforms now, there’s no one else doing that.

NTV:You support about a dozen platforms. Has that part of the video world improved or become more difficult in terms of fragmentation?
JF: To me, the players are known right now, but every year or so a new one gets added. The other factor that’s difficult to work in is that each demographic has its own preferred platform. We’re on our third big international deal and the platforms internationally are even more fragmented.

This fragmentation is going to continue. I don’t think we’re going to see a harmonization because the OSs exist to create business models. I don’t see everybody sitting back and saying, ‘I’m going to let Google own that,’ or ‘I’m going let Samsung own that.’ No very large company is going to sit back; they’ll continue to battle for the glass.

I think you’ll see more OSs. [Nintendo] Switch is one I’m excited about … Hopefully, we’ll be able to announce support for it sometime soon.

NTV:After a somewhat slow start, Android TV seems to be picking up a lot of momentum and adoption with video service providers. Have you also seen an increase in interest in Android TV from your partners and clients?
JF: We support it and we support Amazon Fire TV, which is based on it. I think you’re going to see a continual increase in [adoption].

I’m surprised also to see a bunch of these casting devices come out … and those are not working. A, it’s not a great experience unless you have a device to cast to; and B, you have a device that is plugged in. Who at 7 p.m. has enough battery left on their phone to cast for two hours? And you can’t collect data. Everyone is desperate for data right now and being able to monetize, sell you stuff and create better shows and know you better…not in a nefarious way, but to make better business models. That trend is dying, which means, automatically, that Android TV is getting some pickup.

Despite the growing number of ways people can watch video content, 92% of all viewing by U.S. adults is done on a TV screen, according to Nielsen.

Nielsen’s fourth-quarter "Comparable Metrics Report" found that adults spent 509 billion minutes viewing on TVs in the quarter and another 63.6 billion minutes viewing on TV-connected devices. Viewing video on PCs accounted for 31.7 billion minutes, smartphone video for 10.9 billion minutes and tablets for 4.4 billion minutes, for a combined share of viewing of 7.6%.

TV has a weekly reach of 89% of all adults, but only 79% of millennials (adults 18-34). TV-connected devices reach 44% of all adults and 54% of those 18-34.

Those young adults spent more time on their phones — 19 hours, 39 minutes per week — than watching the tube, at 19:18, according to Nielsen. Among all adults, 34 hours, 32 minutes per week were spent watching TV, with another 4:18 on TV-connected devices. They spent 17:48 per week on their phones.

Nielsen said its "Comparable Metrics Report" is an in-depth study of users and usage — averaged across the U.S. population — designed to provide an “apples to apples” view of consumption across TV, radio, TV-connected devices, PCs, smartphones and tablets.

“The fact of the matter is that viewers use the TV screen for the bulk of their viewing and spend more time doing so than all the other platforms combined,” said Tom Ziangas, SVP Research at AMC Networks. “Sure, viewers have more options today, but when looking at platforms in a comparative fashion, it’s clear that consumers choose the television as the primary vehicle for content,” he added.

Amid a sea of product choices from Google, Roku, Amazon and Apple alongside a surge in available OTT content, about 43% of U.S. Internet homes will own at least one streaming media player by the end of 2019, NPD Connected Intelligence predicted in its new Connected Home Forecast.

By that time, NPD expects there to be 238 million installed Internet-connected TV devices, representing a 59% rate of growth from 2015 to 2019.

NPD said connected TVs will drive 45% of the growth in the next four years, while less expensive, streaming media players will drive 35% of that growth.

“With an ever-increasing number of connectable devices expected to be connected to the Internet, viewers will have the ability to choose their preferred option instead of using the only device they have attached to their TV,” John Buffone, executive director, industry analyst at NPD Connected Intelligence, said in a statement. “This shift will inevitably result in diminished usage for some devices.”

This year and through 2019, NPD also expects streaming media devices to be found in more homes than any other connected TV devices, pointing to products from companies such as Google, Roku, Amazon and Apple.  Likewise, NPD expects a consolidation and shakeout of operating systems to occur, as more TV makers opt to partner with the likes of Roku and Google and step away from managing their own app ecosystems.

NPD based its forecast and research on a consumer panel of more than 5,000 U.S. consumers, aged 18-plus.