Consumers Have Something Good To Say About YouTube TV

YouTube TV, the over-the-top TV service launched more than a year ago, doesn’t have the most subscribers among the streaming crowd, but it appears to be leading the pack in terms of consumer sentiment.

That’s according to findings in Crimson Hexagon’s Consumer Electronics Report, which analyzed a massive pool of public social data. Crimson Hexagon estimates that its A.I.-powered insights engine carved out findings from more than 1 trillion posts of “consumer conversations and opinions” from a mix global sources, including social networks and enterprise-held data.

Crimson Hexagon, which uses that repository of data to help partners such as General Mills, Twitter, Adidas and Paramount Pictures get a fix on tracking brand perception and marketing campaign performance, found that YouTube TV generated the most positive consumer sentiment among the OTT services it tracked (74%), edging out Netflix, Hulu and HBO Now. PlayStation Vue and Sling TV — two rival OTT TV services — were shown to have more negative consumer sentiment.

Crimson Hexagon noted that YouTube TV was praised in part for having a relatively low ad load, while Netflix was given props for its broad catalog as well as its original series and shows.

Among the subscription video-on-demand crowd, Netflix’s “share of voice” dominated both Hulu and Amazon Video, according to Crimson Hexagon’s data pool.

The firm noted that the online discussion around streaming services has seen a meteoric rise. While that online conversation accounted for about 3 million posts in 2010, that number surged to 67 million in 2017.

The study also shed some light on consumer sentiment in the smart home arena, finding that the discussion has become increasingly positive since 2010, mirroring the growth of consumer adoptions. Smart lighting received the most positive attention in this category, followed by entertainment, home assistants, home heating and air conditioning control, and home security.

Amazon and Google were the top two smart home brands, trailed by Apple and Nest (which is part of Google).