Multichannel News

Just a couple of years ago, over-the-top (OTT) service was being called “an attractive new gateway to reach TV viewers.” But, today, it seems that almost everyone is using OTT services – streaming of video content over the Internet without the involvement of a multiple-system operator in the control or distribution – either to supplement traditional cable TV services or sometimes as a total replacement for pay TV.

A recent Parks Associates survey found that 7 percent of bro ...read more

About 51% of pay TV subs are “very interested” in having unlimited space to store DVR recordings, Parks Associates found in a survey.

Parks said that trend is illustrative of consumer demand for cloud-based DVR services, predicting that the number of subs taking a cloud DVR service will exceed 4.6 million by the end of this year, and rise to 24 million by 2018.

That bodes well for MVPDs that have launched those services already. Comcast’s Cloud DVR for its X1 platform of ...read more

Brett Sappington, director of research at Parks Associates, said he’s tracking between 60 and 70 different OTT services that exist today that will fit in as consumers continue to show a willingness to self-aggregate video. Content providers, he said, are pushing ahead because they “don’t want to be the last one to the party, or not be there at all when things start to pop.”

And broadcasters and cable nets are pivoting to OTT while also keeping their legacy businesses on trac ...read more

While HBO has not yet confirmed a launch date or a price for the OTT service, a Parks Associates survey found that 17% of U.S. broadband homes are “likely” to subscribe to an OTT service from HBO. Of that group, 91% were currently pay-TV subscribers, and about half of them would cancel their pay-TV service after subscribing to the new OTT offering from HBO, Parks found.

International Business Times is also reporting that HBO and Apple are in talks to have the Apple TV serve ...read more

If any player recognizes a tectonic shift, it’s HBO. Expanding the premium channel’s audience beyond cable “is the most exciting inflection point in HBO history,” CEO Richard Plepler declared in announcing cable-untethered HBO. “Just the threat of going over-the-top gives us additional leverage.”

How might streaming HBO impact Comcast, Verizon, DirecTV and the rest of the herd of pay TV giants? A recent Parks Associates survey found that 17% of U.S. households likely would s ...read more

You can often discern the promise of an emerging industry by the volume and diversity of the forecasts for its success. Among the recent prognostications and analyses:

Parks Associates predicts more than ten million M2M (machine-to-machine) health connections by 2018.

From the article "Cable's Lame Role in Health Tech" by Gary Arlen.
 

But not all 4K content will come at a premium. Amazon announced last week that its Prime subscribers will have free access to 4K titles offered via the company’s Prime Instant Video service, including such originals as Transparent and Alpha House.

They’re all dipping their toes into a budding market. Parks Associates predicts more than 46 million homes worldwide will subscribe to a 4K pay TV service by 2018, and that 4K TVs will follow a similar, but faster, growth rate as H ...read more

Linear video will never die, but it’s clearly not the primary way consumers in broadband-connected homes are consuming their video.

Amplifying the trend toward video-on-demand, the DVR and over-the-top streaming services, Parks Associates said a new study found that the average U.S. broadband household watches 17.4 hours of non-linear video per week, versus 11.5 hours of linear video.

That’s been the way of it for a while. A multi-year view of Parks Associates’ surveys ...read more