Adobe Video Benchmark Report Shows Online TV Consumption Up Nearly 250 Percent

Here's a bit of good news -- a new study shows that we're not a bunch of couch potatoes flipping through cable and satellite TV channels all day. The bad news? We may have simply transitioned our viewing habits to connected devices. However you want to slice it, Adobe today released its Q1 2014 Video Benchmark Report and in it stated that online TV consumption across all devices grew a staggering 246 percent year-over-year. March was a particularly busy month, as it set a new record in total authentications.

Game consoles and over-the-top (OTT) devices showed the biggest growth with a 539 percent increase in market share. And for the first time ever, iOS apps leapfrogged ahead of Internet browsers as the most popular access point for TV content by achieving a 43 percent market share -- browsers, meanwhile, dropped to a 36 percent share, down from 47 percent a year prior.

Adobe Online Benchmark

"More than one fifth of all pay-TV households in the U.S. now watch TV online across screens," said Jeremy Helfand, vice president, Primetime, Adobe. "With rapidly rising consumer expectations for TV across devices, the TV industry is moving through a rapid transformation and finding new ways to bring TV to whatever screen audiences want to watch."

Just about every facet of online viewing is seeing growth. For example, the average number of streams per viewer each month jumped 133 percent year-over-year, and the number of unique TV Everywhere -- online TV viewers -- visitors to websites and apps per month increased 157 percent compared to last year.

Adobe Online Graph

Adobe's findings are based on aggregated and anonymous data from over 1,300 media and entertainment sites. It includes 151 billion total online video starts and 1.3 billion TV Everywhere authentications across 250 pay-TV service providers covering 99 percent of pay-TV households in the U.S.