If TV Everywhere was a major motion picture, it would be the biggest box office bomb of all time.
Fully five years after its launch, only 19 percent of MVPD customers polled by the Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) have a firm grasp of what the TV Everywhere initiative is without having the term explained to them.
To put this very low benchmark into some perspective using another consumer product also tied to video entertainment: This weekend, the Warner Bros. Pictures comedy Tammy, which entered the production pipeline just within the last 18 months, will arrive in theaters with an overall unaided awareness among moviegoers of well over 70 percent.
The better news for TV Everywhere: CTAM, which polled 608 pay TV customers in April, found that 49 percent of respondents recognized what TV Everywhere is when the researcher explained what the term meant (i.e. "aided awareness"). Meanwhile, 44 percent of respondents said they'd used a TV Everywhere feature within the last six months.
Those figures probably count as progress. In January, content discovery specialist RAMP conducted a poll on LinkedIn and found that only about 33 percent of respondents had ever used a TV Everywhere feature.
If the pay TV industry can ever find the will to fully realize the consumer potential of the initiative, CTAM's study confirms the benefit--55 percent of respondents said TV Everywhere makes them feel like they're getting a better value for their MVPD bill, and 61 percent said it made their premium channel subscription feel more worthwhile.
CTAM plans to commission a second wave of its TV Everywhere study, which is executed by Hub Entertainment Research, later this year.
With high TV Everywhere usage rates being recorded for the Winter Olympics and ongoing FIFA World Cup, CTAM offials expect awareness to rapidly improve in the coming months.
"The combination of rapid growth in available content, a record number of viewers watching major sporting events on multiple devices, and a unity of purpose through CTAM's TV Everywhere initiative is putting the category on a fast-track to success," said John Lansing, president and CEO, CTAM, in a statement. "The CTAM/Hub research establishes new benchmarks, and is a rallying call for the industry to collaboratively and aggressively communicate the extraordinary value of TV Everywhere."
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(Source: CTAM) |
For more:
- read this CTAM study (.pdf)
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