Viewership shifting from TV sets to laptops, mobile phones

With players such as Netflix and Hotstar luring viewers with new content, consumers are shifting their viewership from TV sets to devices such as laptops and mobile phones.

According to Accenture Digital Consumer Survey, the percentage of Indian consumers who prefer watching shows on TV sets plummeted from 47 per cent to 10 per cent over the last one year.

The global online survey of 26,000 consumers in 26 countries reveals that consumers increasingly prefer to watch TV shows on devices such as laptop and desktop personal computers and smartphones. More than four in 10 consumers (42 per cent) said they would rather view TV shows on a laptop or desktop, up from 32 per cent in last year’s survey.

Thirteen per cent said they prefer watching TV shows on their smartphones, compared with 10 per cent last year.

The decline in TV viewing over the past year tracks with a four-year trend. As recently as 2014, the survey revealed that nearly two-thirds (65 per cent) of consumers preferred the TV set for viewing TV shows.

“Over the past one year, we have seen a surge in the launch of over-the-top services both, by global and Indian media and entertainment companies. The ever increasing penetration of the internet mainly through mobile, backed by Wi-Fi and broadband has helped this wave. This coupled with high-quality content hosted by the content providers has enticed the Indian consumers to view varied content both live broadcast and video-on-demand (VOD) on different devices,” said Aditya Chaudhuri, Managing Director and lead for Accenture’s communications, media and technology group in India.

While consumers increasingly prefer to watch TV shows on laptops and desktops, the smartphone is becoming the preferred device for watching short video clips. In the most-recent survey, more than one-third (41 per cent) of consumers said they would rather view these clips on their mobile handsets, a substantial increase from 28 per cent last year.

In contrast, the number of consumers who said they would rather watch video clips on their laptops and desktops dropped slightly, from 47 per cent to 44 per cent over the last year, while the number who said they prefer to view these clips on their TV sets dropped even more, from 16 per cent to 5 per cent.