The amount of time people spent watching live TV per day dropped year-over-year by one minute to four hours and six minutes in the third quarter, according to measurement firm Nielsen.
That represents a slowing viewer decline: a year ago in the third quarter, there was a bigger drop of six minutes to four hours and 13 minutes. Nielsen’s third-quarter Total Audience Report also showed that the amount of time spent with DVRs and time-shifted TV rose to 29 minutes from 28 minutes one year ago.Meanwhile, the number of TV households with subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services, such as Netflix, rose to 54% in the third quarter of 2016 from 46% a year earlier, and the number of households subscribing to pay-TV fell 1.8% to 89.2 million from 100 million a year ago. In the second quarter, there were 98.7 million pay-TV homes.
On the cord-cutting front, the number of broadband-only homes rose 27% to 4.6 million from 4.36 million. Broadcast-only homes rose 12% to 14.3 million from 12.8 million.
For pay-TV, cable homes rose to 52.8 million homes from 52.3 million homes a year ago; satellite rose to 35 million homes from 34.6 million homes; and IPTV dropped to 10.8 million from 13.5 million amid AT&T cutting back on U-verse adds in favour of DirecTV.
