Switching on the ‘super viewer’

The rise of streaming TV and has produced a new breed of audience coined the ‘super viewer’ by researchers comScore. This new demographic is characterised as a highly-engaged, multi-platform consumer that craves specific content that appeals to their interests, hobbies or passions throughout the day, no matter the time or device.

comScore state that the trend is emerging across subscription TV networks, like Foxtel, that create lifestyle or interest-based content around particular categories like cooking, finance, news and sports. The researchers have also found that instead of one platform competing with another for their attention and time, super viewers actually consume more content throughout the day across multiple devices versus single platform users.

As super viewers access content across TV and digital, comScore claims that this results in a benefit of up to a 50% lift in the total audience reach of the TV platform when they account for the content consumption is happening across all their digital properties. The research suggests that in certain categories such as sports and news, super viewers account for more than 42% and 27% of total time spent on TV and digital platforms, respectively.

This type of content consumer is affecting the way pay TV and OTT operators interact. As a result, many operators are now moving beyond the ‘TV Everywhere’  concept to provide their own standalone OTT services that target different consumer segments, either with subscription VOD or Pay TV Lite, which is a sub-set of the full Pay TV offer with shorter contracts and content choices.

Some Pay TV operators are now integrating third-party SVOD, like Netflix, into their set-top box platforms to help keep customers on-platform. In Australia we are seeing this with the adoption of FetchTV on the Optus and iiNet platforms.

CombiTel