Times Are A-Changing

Our recent upgrade to the TWCable TV iPad application got me curious about our customers’ viewing habits. I started wondering how people time shift… so I looked into the numbers. And you know what? They were astonishing. Over 600,000 people downloaded the first version of our iPad app.

Then I started wondering about all of the other time shifting technologies we have at Time Warner Cable:  Start Over, Look Back, On Demand, DVR.  Customers are selecting the content they want to watch, when they want to watch it, on the device of their choosing. According to TechCrunch, only fifty-two percent of Americans’ TV viewing time is spent on live TV.

*Graphs via TechCrunch.com

In our Northeast service area, Syracuse customers are the largest group of time shifters. They have used Look Back over 2.5 million times and Start Over over half a million times to date this year. Our Rochester customers are enjoying Primetime On Demand more than any of our other customers in the Northeast.

In my opinion, the reason Rochester customers use Primetime On Demand so much is because Rochester has a large concentration of tech enthusiasts, including Rochester Institute of Technology students and graduates, technology companies and engineers.

The Northeast as a whole has used the Start Over feature over ten million times in 2011 and watched shows on the free Primetime On Demand channel over 6.5 million times.

Americans are choosing to time shift and record their favorite programs to a storage device more than ever. According to a February study from Nielsen (PDF link), thirty-eight percent of TV households in America have a DVR in the home, viewing on average two hours and thirteen minutes of recorded TV a week.  In a recent Multichannel News article, MagnaGlobal forecasts DVRs will be in 51.3% of TV households five years from now.  The number of US households with DVRs is projected to hit 63.1 million in 2016, up from 40.5 million at the end of the first quarter of 2011. Similarly VOD households will reach 57.5% of TV households by 2016, up from 45.6% at the end of the first quarter of 2011.

On top of people choosing to time shift their television watching habits, they are also choosing alternative locations to watch shows and movies; viewing content on the iPad is one example.  In January alone, 143.9 million Americans watched videos online, spending an average of four hours thirty-nine minutes watching videos on a computer. The report from MagnaGlobal estimates by the end of the year there will 87,000 households reliant on alternate forms of media and that number will grow to 8.4 million by 2016.

So is this how people are going to watch TV now?

It’s looking like it!

Do you time shift?

If you want to learn how to use all these great features visit the Time Warner Cable YouTube channel.

Categories: Cool Stuff, Future of the Industry, Northeast, On Demand, TV Everywhere, TWC on TV, What's New