A recent article from an industry TV Trade that shall go unnamed:
“VIEWERS PREFER COMPUTER SCREEN – People still want to watch TV shows, but a new Accenture 2017 Digital Consumer Survey finds that most prefer watching on a computer screen rather than a TV screen. The worldwide survey found the percentage of consumers who prefer watching TV shows on television sets plummeted from a year earlier from 52% to 23%. In the United States, the number fell 57% from 59% to 25%. Meanwhile, the smartphone is becoming the preferred device for watching short video clips.”
Rubbish.
Why for example does that not seem to jive with Advertising Age recently noting Fox’s telecast of Super Bowl LI drew an average of 111.3 million viewers, while the livestream of the game on Fox Go averaged just 1.72 million, or only about 1.5% of the total audience???
Accenture helps clients “imagine and invent” their future… cool right? More specifically they provide business strategy, consulting and analytics. Evidently they also put out a lot of nonsense. I mean, where to begin?
Accompanying the survey is a colorful infographic with a picture of a young girl and her puppy staring happily (the dog curiously) at a handheld device. Even canines are now seeking out enhanced video experiences!! The report Winning Experiences in the New Video World was conducted:
- online – so those surveyed already had a proclivity for online viewing
- in 26 countries with samples in each country representative of that countries online population – China and India (2 of the 26) together constitute 1,071,434,547 of the 3,424,971,231 total online world population… or 30%
- with 26,000 14-55 year old’s
So for all we know it skews heavily toward tech savvy teenage girls (with puppies) in India and China.
If 30% of the 26,000 is 7800, that leaves just 758 people surveyed on avg for each of the remaining 24 countries. TV is not popular in China to begin with, where there are 375,000,000 HH’s w/ TVs compared to 950,000,000 cell phones. India is set to reach 500,000,000 smartphones by 2020. These are big places, with lots of people that are not as lucky as we are to have 60” flat screens in every room, 300 channels and large plush couches to sit on when we watch them. Who knows how the cultural and economic differences affect outcomes of a survey like this. One thing that is very telling about the bias in it is this little stat – “the number of consumers who said they would rather watch ‘video clips’ on their TV’s dropped from 16 percent to only 5 percent”. I’m surprised that 16% were willing to watch a “video clip” on TV to begin with. Who watches “video clips” on TV?! Furthermore, ‘video clips’ are part of how “content” is defined in the survey. All content is not created equal.
Now, if you will excuse me, I can see from my Smart Home security app that my dog has once again disobeyed my orders, invited some friends over and is ordering The Secret Life of Pets on demand for the tenth time this month!! Why that little…
