Probably the most compelling statistic from the survey is their estimate that as of October 2013 the number of cord cutters has grown to 7.5 million households, or 6.5% of all households. This is several million higher than previously published estimates. This survey shows that age is an important factor in cord cutting and that 12.4% of households that have at least one family member who is a millennial between the ages of 18 and 34 are cord cutters. And something that makes sense is that over 18% of those with a NetFlix or Hulu account have become cord cutters.
The survey also shows that the number of people who watch streaming video continues to grow and that 48% of all adults and 67% of those under age 35 watch streaming or downloaded video from the Internet each week. And this is growing rapidly and both of those numbers increased by 3 percentage points just over the prior six months.
The main purpose of this survey was to look at viewing habits by type of device. One of the surprising findings to me is that smartphones are now the primary device used to watch streaming video. I guessed it surprised me because this is not one of the ways we watch video in our household other than videos that pop up from Facebook. But during a typical week 24% of all adults or 42% of smartphone users watch video.
The television set is still the obvious device of choice for viewing content and 94% of adults watch something on their television each week. Only 84% of adults now use the television to watch live programming and the rest are watching in some different manner. For instance 40% of television watchers still view content from DVDs, 32% get content from a DVR, 13% watch pay-per-view and 9% watch streaming video. As of February 2014, 34% of television sets are now connected to the Internet. Of those 41% use AppleTV, 35% use Roku and the rest have Internet-enabled TVs.
Adults are watching content on a lot of different devices now. Something that might be surprising to bosses around the country is that 16% of adults with a PC at work use it to watch streaming video. One fourth of adults who own game consoles watch streaming video, 26% of adults who own a home PC use it for videos, and 42% of adults who have either a smartphone or tablet use them to watch video.
The survey also looked at what people watch and the time spent with specific programming on each kind of device. For example, YouTube is the source for 59% of the video watched on PCs and the average adult spends over 21 minutes per week watching it. Only 7% of content viewed on PCs is NetFlix, but the average time spent is over 23 minutes per week. And over 10 minutes per week is spent on PCs watching Hulu, Bing Videos and Fox News.
The survey also asked how adults feel about advertising that comes with the video on each kind of device. Not surprising to me, only 9% of those over 50 found the advertising on their smartphone to be useful and 14% found advertising on the TV to be useful. But younger viewers are not quite as jaded as us baby boomers and 36% of millennials find advertising on their smartphone to be useful and 39% find TVs advertising to be useful.