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 track.

“My feeling is that they are damned if they do or damned if they don’t,” Dixon said. “Their audiences are moving anyway.” And they are increasingly moving beyond the “C3” window, whereby consumers watch a show within three days of its original broadcast. In its “Video Monetization” report for the fourth quarter of 2014, FreeWheel, the Comcast-owned ad technology company, highlighted that just 28% of all TV viewing occurs within three days of a show’s linear air date, while 64% occurs after a week. That strongly suggests that a large number of consumers are using OTT to catch up.

Parks Associates, meanwhile, found that nearly 20% of U.S. broadband homes would be willing to pay for an OTT service from HBO, while more than 10% would gravitate to CBS All Access, and almost 10% would give a serious look at a similar type of offering from other premium video providers.

Parks Associates also found that 15% of pay TV subs are also “likely” to subscribe to a new OTT service. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that figure varies by demographic — 21% of millennials are likely to subscribe to one of the new OTT options, versus 19% among Gen Xers, 7% of baby boomers and 5% of “mature” consumers.

From the article "Curious Behavior: John Hendricks’s New Direct-To-Consumer Service Aims To Accelerate Video’s Over-The-Top Evolution" by Jeff Baumgartner.

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