People who paid more for their TV watch less ad-supported video

Here’s an interesting bit of data from Parks Associates’ Connected TV Ecosystem report: Roku owners watch a lot more ad-supported video than owners of TVs made by Samsung or LG, who overwhelmingly prefer to watch subscription video services.

Also in the ad-supported video camp are Vizio owners, while people who use an Apple TV as their primary streaming device prefer to watch subscription video as well. Both Fire TV and Google’s platforms seem to land somewhere in the middle, with viewers flocking to both subscription and ad-supported video services.

Here’s the chart:

There’s some logic to these results. People who opt for a $2000 TV tend to have more money to spare on subscription services than someone who gets their TV for $250 (or uses a streaming stick connected to an old TV that they weren’t ready to replace).

However, the results are also a bit surprising for the simple fact that Samsung and LG have spent a lot of effort on promoting their own ad-supported streaming services.

Still, there are two trends that seem to translate across platforms:

• Subscription video remains the most popular way to stream, no matter what kind of TV people have at home.

• TV Everywhere (authenticated video apps for cable subscribers) and transactional (video rentals) are far less popular than both ad-supported and paid streaming.

The data is based on a Parks Associates survey of 8000 US internet households, which were asked what kind of video services they had used on their primary TV over the past 30 days.

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Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash