Digital Video on The Rise [Report]

The Adobe Digital Index team looked at 19.6 billion video starts on media websites to confirm the growth of broadcast video consumption across connected devices. But the useful insights don’t stop there. See the latest trends in device use, ad placement, and more. U.S. Digital Video Benchmark Report.

CONSUMPTION OF ENCRYPTED CONTENT IS SURGING
TV Every­where video con­tent, which grants access to encrypted con­tent through sub­scriber authen­ti­ca­tion, has grown over 12x year-over-year (YoY) in 2012. The hockey stick growth curve is due par­tially to major sport­ing events and par­tially to the increased adop­tion by afflu­ent, tech savvy tablet device users. Mobile view­er­ship accounts for over 70% of the TV Every­where views.



How­ever, the most engaged view­ers come from the small por­tion of those access­ing the con­tent via Xbox game con­sole, aver­ag­ing over 14 plays per unique vis­i­tor.  Apple users, which are largely made up of iPads, are also highly engaged with 14 plays per unique visitor.

TABLET ACCESS DRIVES GROWTH
Online dig­i­tal video con­tent con­sump­tion has also ramped up in 2012, grow­ing at a rate of 30% YoY.  Like TV Every­where, online video con­sump­tion growth is related to mobile devices. Online video starts, defined as the ini­tial access of any video, have grown 360% for tablets and 300% for mobile phones in 2012.



WILL DIGITAL VIDEO REPLACE OR AUGMENT TRADITIONAL TELEVISION?
Although the growth trends are very strong, they do not imply that view­ers are throw­ing out their tele­vi­sion and mov­ing exclu­sively to dig­i­tal video con­sump­tion.  In fact, most con­tent con­sump­tion pat­terns indi­cate that dig­i­tal and pre­mium video con­tent con­sump­tion aug­ments rather than replaces tra­di­tional ways of watch­ing TV.  How­ever, the col­li­sion of mobile pen­e­tra­tion, high speed data avail­abil­ity and usage pat­terns of dig­i­tal video con­tent demon­strates that con­sumers will be demand­ing that broad­cast­ers pro­vide addi­tional lev­els of access to their con­tent in the future. We expect these shifts to have pro­found impact on the future of the media business.

• For adver­tis­ers, tar­geted ad con­tent will become more of a real­ity with large TV pro­gram­mers begin­ning to latch onto the mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal video dis­tri­b­u­tion meth­ods. With mobile devices con­tin­u­ing to shape the way con­sumers respond to media con­tent, the data shows that mul­ti­ple forms of dig­i­tal video access are here to stay and mobile con­tin­ues to be a viable medium for TV and sports related video content.
• For broad­cast­ers, new plat­forms are pro­vid­ing incre­men­tal value and tar­get­ing capa­bil­i­ties. Early adopters of dig­i­tal video are afflu­ent, engaged, multi-device con­sumer which should spur adver­tis­ers to pay extra to gain access to this crowd. With strictly online media com­pa­nies pro­duc­ing unique con­tent, it may only be a mat­ter of time before all TV pub­lish­ers are want­ing to make more con­tent read­ily avail­able because it is the most ben­e­fi­cial for them and the consumer.
• For con­sumers, dig­i­tal video leads us to an entirely dif­fer­ent way to con­sume con­tent, where we pay one time for dig­i­tal access to con­tent and are then able to gain access on a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent tech­nol­ogy plat­forms. Chal­lenges still remain before TV Every­where is really every­where, with the major­ity of con­sumers decid­ing to remain with stan­dard TV for broad­cast con­tent. How­ever, the future is bright for tech­nol­ogy already adopted by many large TV and sports broad­cast­ers as a valu­able way to reach a grow­ing mobile con­sumer base with valu­able video content.

Mar­ket­ing prac­ti­tioner and media exec­u­tives will want to ask them­selves if they are uti­liz­ing these chan­nels well enough yet. -Tamara Gaffney, Adobe, @tamarag

Ani­mated info­graphic.

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