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The heyday of outdoor TV antennas or rabbit ears will never return, experts say. But research firms and the National Association of Broadcasters have noticed the uptick in over-the-air TV antenna householders as people patch together different ways of accessing entertainment with traditional pay-TV services. The number of internet-only households with TV antennas rose about six percentage points over the last five years, to 15 percent by the third quarter of 2016, according to P ...read more

Voice’s resurgence seems counter-intuitive. The technology first boomed in the 1990s with voice prompters in customer call centers – not always a satisfying experience as the prompters many times routed callers in the wrong direction. Then nothing happened with voice, until Apple released Siri in 2011, and Amazon followed with Alexa in 2014, experts say.

Dina Abdelrazik, market research analyst at Parks Associates in Dallas, said that in recent years, “voice took the market ...read more

The unusual deal is seen by industry experts as a sign that anime distributors won’t be able to survive alone against Amazon and Netflix.

CrunchyRoll, based in San Francisco, is the most popular dedicated anime streaming service in the U.S., according to a 2016 ranking by Parks Associates, a market research firm. The platform even ranks in the top 10 overall subscription services, just below HBO Now and ahead of Showtime.

“There’s no question that consumption is changing ...read more

So says market-research and consulting firm Parks Associates that estimates that the percentage of U.S. households that watch TV via antennas rose to 15 percent in 2016 from 9 percent in 2013. The results came from an online survey.

"What is driving this is that over time pay-TV prices have continued to go up," said Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates. The "perceived value of pay-TV is the No. 1 reason people cancel or downgrade their pay-TV ser ...read more

Herscovici grins as he throws out that shock line, "but we certainly understand the frustration people feel when other product-support operators pass the buck, claim, 'It's not our problem.' The buck stops here."

Educating and supporting the consumer are clearly key to growing the connected-home market.

Even among U.S. households with broadband service, newly released market research from Parks Associates found that less than 30 percent of respondents were familiar with ...read more

Smart-home technology is building quickly to a multi-billion-dollar business in Western Europe, say market researchers at Parks Associates, and the Malvern-based "Internet of Things" platform developer Zonoff aims to score a big hunk of that overseas action.

From the article "Malvern-Based Home Automation Firm Bets Big On Europe" by Jonathan Takiff.

Parks Associates notes that 31 percent of U.S. broadband households already own some sort of device - a smart TV, video game system or Blu-ray player - that can stream media, while 14 percent more broadband households plan to buy an Internet TV receiver this year.

And why not? Reasonably priced and easily installed, (with 15 Mbps or better Wi-Fi or wired Ethernet service at home), these high-def Web TV receivers offer an often free bounty of services focused on movies and TV ...read more

NBCUniversal and its owner, cable and Internet giant Comcast, have been trying different ways to get young people's attention as live TV viewing declines. If Seeso had been born 15 years ago, it would have launched as a cable channel, said Evan Shapiro, Executive Vice President of NBCUniversal Digital Enterprises. But online viewing today is "clearly part of the mainstream," and to reach comedy nerds, Comcast is launching Seeso as an online subscription service.

Comcast has ...read more