Signaling the continuation of the brand-awareness problem affecting the pay-TV industry's six-year-old multiscreen initiative, only 25 percent of U.S. consumers ages 13 to 64 have heard of the term "TV Everywhere," according to research firm GfK.
This represents only a modest improvement over the 19 percent figure published by the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) in July of 2014. GfK said the awareness benchmark for TVE has stayed fairly flat since 2012.
"Consumer education continues to be a critical missing piece of the puzzle for TV Everywhere," said David Tice, senior VP of media and entertainment at GfK. "With a notable proportion of people in pay-TV homes already using TVE, greater awareness and understanding of the services could drive even higher adoption."
Last week, pay-TV multiscreen vendor Adobe published research suggesting that only 13.6 percent to pay-TV subscribers regularly use authenticated pay-TV services.
In its latest report, TV Everywhere 2015, GfK paints a slightly less bleak picture of TVE usage. According to GfK, 53 percent of pay-TV homes have used TVE to watch shows on computers, mobile and OTT devices, an increase of 10 percent over 2012.
Of those users, 42 percent accessed TVE services through operator apps, while 46 percent used apps provided by the programming networks themselves.
Notably, GfK found that authentication, long viewed as a complicated hurdle to TVE usage, may not be as much of an issue as thought. Nearly three-quarters of survey respondents said it was easy to log into TVE apps and view what they wanted to see.
For more:
- read this GfK announcement
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