A new study from TiVo-owned Digitalsmiths shows that TV viewers would pick ABC, CBS and Discovery Channel above other channels if given the chance to buy TV service a la carte.
According to the fourth quarter study, 76.6% of respondents would like to pay for only the channels they watch—up 3% year-over-year. On average, respondents picked 18 channels to put in their perfect line-up and said they would pay $25.82 per month for the package.
The report surveyed TV viewers in both the U.S. and Canada but broke out the U.S. results since channel availability differs between the countries.
In the U.S., ABC was the most popular choice (65.8%), CBS was second (63.5%), Discovery Channel was third (61.8%), NBC was fourth (61%) and History Channel was fifth (56%).
Interestingly, the top five remained the same as compared to the Digitalsmiths’ study from the previous quarter but NBC fell from third to fourth in terms of popularity while Discovery Channel rose one spot to take its place.
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While the most popular channels on an a la carte basis remained largely unchanged, the amount consumers would be willing to pay for those channels dropped quite a bit. In the U.S., respondents’ average price for the top 20 channels would be $28.87, down 12.3% from the previous quarter, and in Canada, respondents’ average price for the top 20 channels would be $28.16, down 12% from the previous quarter.
“While the reason for the decrease in value of linear/broadcast channels remains unknown, it’s apparent that OTT providers are placing a considerable amount of pressure on broadcast networks. In the early days of OTT, almost all of the content was movies; nowadays, not only are OTT providers offering original episodic content, they are also offering episodic content of shows that originally ran on broadcast/pay-TV channels,” wrote Digitalsmiths in the report.