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The average American watches more than five hours of TV per day, but pretty soon that leisure time may be dominated by YouTube and other online video services.
In an address at CES 2016, YouTube's chief business officer Robert Kyncl argued that digital video will be the single biggest way that Americans spend their free time by 2020 – more than watching TV, listening to music, playing video games, or reading.
The amount of time people spend watching TV each day has been pretty steady for a few years now, Mr. Kyncl pointed out, while time spent watching online videos has grown by more than 50 percent each year. Data from media research firm Nielsen shows that it's not just young people watching online videos, either: adults aged 35 to 49 spent 80 percent more time on video sites in 2014 than in 2013, and adults aged 50 to 64 spent 60 percent more time on video sites over the same time period.
Why the shift?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 13 2016, @03:50PM
I think Roku is a player in that. But DVR was/is a big factor too.
People do not watch TV like they used to. We were trying to do this back when VHS was a thing. Storage just was not up to the task (speed and cost). Fast forward was bad too. It is very good now. We want to timeshift what we do to our convenient time to watch. Youtube/Roku/Tivo and services like it let you do this.
I know several people who have not cut the cord. But only because they want to watch 'the game'. They do not watch them live. They use the DVR and timeshift out the commercials. They will come in when the game starts pause it and then come back 1-2 hours later and start watching it. Or just straight up record it and skip all the boring junk.
I watched the progression of my coworkers. It was 'did you see x last night' to 'got a tivo' to 'have not watched it yet I have it recorded' to 'I got rid of cable' to 'I mostly use blah' where blah is something like youtube/roku/hulu/netflix/amazon/torrent.
There is no 'one big thing'. It is a bunch of techs all coming together to create the a-la-carte everyone has wanted. Mostly storage and network speeds. Roku is solving an interesting fragmentation problem. Where the copyright holders are trying to squeeze a bit more out of the lemon. They do that by shopping the catalogs around thru the different services. All in one devices like Roku glue it all back together. I personally use KODI. The copyright holders are going to find individual shows have less and less value. Because they will be competing with all of the existence of TV plus anything new. It is the same problem music copyright conglomerates are having. Yet they are trying to charge more and more. So services like youtube are filling in the other end.
I figure cable will move to a time window sort of mass scheduling and people schedule it to get recorded into their DVR. Or just straight up broadcast IP TV with massive amounts of bandwidth and a-la-carte. They will have to. The 'never corders' are coming. They probably have a good 15-20 years to get with it. But after that it will be massive red on the balance sheets if they dont.