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CES: Survey Finds Traditional TV Viewing Is Collapsing

In a stunning finding, Accenture asserts in a new survey of consumer behavior that traditional television viewership is experiencing a wholesale collapse.

The survey, the results of which are being released Monday, just as the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show gets underway in Las Vegas, finds that the number of consumers who watch broadcast or cable television in a typical week plunged to 48% in 2011 from 71% in 2009. The same survey, which canvased about 1,000 consumers in each of 10 countries – Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden and the Untied States – also found that the number of consumers who intend to buy a TV set in the next 12 months fell to 32% in 2011 from 35% in 2010.

Those are absolutely stunning results, which is accurate suggest that consumer behavior on television watching is changing faster than anyone had expected. There have been hints before – like the much higher than expected Q4 data on video streaming from Netflix. The company recently said that customers streamed 2 billion hours of video in the fourth quarter.

Accenture’s explanation for the trend is that the TV is losing ground to other devices – mobile phones, laptops and tablets – in the battle for consumer eyeballs. The survey does not conclude that everyone has suddenly stopped watching video and starting reading books and listening to the radio; rather, consumers are simply doing their watching in different places, on different devices.

Among the survey group, 53% own a smartphone, up from 28% in 2010. Tablet ownership jumped to 12%, from 8% in 2010. The percentage of the survey group that intends to buy a smartphone jumped to 27%, from 24%. For tablets, the number of consumers who plan to make a purchase jumped to 16%, from 8% a year ago.

Note that 44% of tablet owners stream media content; 43% download apps at least once a week.

A third of all consumers watch shows, movies or videos on their PCs. 10% watch programming on their smartphones.

Also noteworthy is the way the cloud is changing consumer behavior. 56% of the respondant say they have changed their behavior due to online services and cloud computing. Nearly a third have stopped or almost stopped renting or buying DVDs. 37% say they play online games. 26% stream online content.

And bad news for TV makers: just 25% of the survey group were interested in 3D, and likewise just 25% wanted to be able to access the Web via their televisions.

So, who is hurt by this? Well, television manufacturers, for one. Earlier Sunday, the Consumer Electronics Association predicted that TV sales in 2012 would up a crummy 1%, after just 2% growth in 2011, consistent with the slackening intent to purchase numbers in the survey. This is also a wake-up call for the multi-channel video providers – the cable, telco and satellite video systems. The data would suggest that cord-cutting is becoming a lot less theoretical than it used to be: consumers increasingly are finding the content they want to watch online, whether through legal means or otherwise. For content producers, the news would seem to be more mixed: while they don’t want to see content pirated, it also shows that the thirst for quality content is high; but consumers want to watch it where they want, when they want, on the devices they want.

For everyone in the television market – cable cos, content producers and set manufacturers – dramatic change is afoot.

Source: Forbes