As viewing of streamed content on connected TVs grows, a new study has found that viewers accept advertising and advertisers are seeing a better response to their commercials.
The study by Telaria (formerly Tremor Media) looked at five countries, including the U.S., and found that nearly 60% of respondents now think of viewing streamed content on a connected set as “watching TV.”
By comparison, about 30% of the respondent to the study considered watching on a smartphone as “watching TV.”
Related: Streaming Video Use Rises to 5.75 Hours a Week
Streaming on connected TVs is most popular with millennials. In the U.S. millennials are 67% more likely to be in connected TV-only households, with 25% reporting that they don’t have pay-TV.
Half of the respondents said they felt that watching ads is a fair value exchange for low-cost content. Moreover, ads on connected TV were “less annoying” than those on linear TV, according to the respondents.
The study also found that those commercials seem to work. More than half of the weekly users of connected TV will either research or purchase an item they see advertised in streaming content.
“Consumer acceptance of ads during connected-TV viewing, in combination with marketers’ interest in buying audiences across different viewing sources, are encouraging signs for a flourishing advertising-funded VOD business,” the report concluded.
“AVOD is expected to be more attractive to broader demographics than SVOD, which tends to cater to younger and wealthier individuals, as well as content enthusiasts,” the report said. “Consumers do value the exchange of content for the price of watching ads – as long as that ad-viewing experience is optimized, i.e. short ad pods, non-intrusive interruptions.”
