OTT becomes one-fourth of all television minutes viewed in 2020

Nielsen this month shared data showing that the streaming among Over The Top (OTT) capable homes accounts for 25% of consumers’ collective time spent with the television. Nielsen says streaming has also taken hold among consumers 55 and older.

Nielsen’s Streaming Meter, a subset of over 1,100 streaming capable homes from the National TV panel (in the US), as of Q2 2020, streaming comprised one-fourth of all television minutes viewed, with Netflix being the largest contributor to streaming share at 34%, followed by YouTube at 20%. In a short amount of time, newcomer Disney+ now accounts for over 4% of total streaming time.

Nielsen’s Remote Workers Consumer Survey found that the number of services consumers are willing to budget for and subscribe to continues to grow as well. 2% of adults said they are reducing the number of paid services they subscribe to, while 25% have added a service in the past three months. Hispanics have adopted new services even more wholeheartedly at 40%.

OTT stands for over-the-top. OTT content can be viewed on multiple devices, including mobile, desktops, laptops, tablets, and connected TVs, and is content normally designed for TV. Examples of OTT content are TV Channels, HBO Now, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Video, and YouTube.

This month, PPC Land reported that the OTT app Peacock reached nearly 3 million installs in the first month. In June, this year, FreeWheel said Connected TV is now a mature platform. Google this year added an OTT line item in DV360, and launched several products on publisher side: a video content explorer, and a lightweight SDK to help distributors monetizing the connected TV. Advertisers need to be careful with what they are buying, as between January and April 2020, DoubleVerify detected a 161% increase year-over-year in fraudulent CTV traffic.