72c, d
Sources: Unless otherwise indicated, data from Nielsen Media Research. Fall 2013 data from “An Era of Growth: The Cross-Platform Report,” March 2014, or “The Digital Consumer,” February 2014; 2005 data pulled from Npower for 15 May 2005 and based on total U.S. homes with a television.
aNielsen Media Research, “Average U.S. Home Now Receives a Record 118.6 TV Channels,” 6 June 2008, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-room/2008/average_u_s__home.html.
bKnowledge Networks Statistical Research, “The Home Technology Monitor: Spring 2005 Ownership and Trend Report” (Crawford, NJ: Knowledge Networks SRI, 2005). The survey uses a telephone sampling method, so the data are figured from a base of telephone households with one or more working television sets.
cNielsen reports 8 percent more homes with Internet-connected computers than does Pew; I’m not sure which report is more in error.
dPew Internet and American Life Project, “Three Technology Revolutions,” http://www.pewinternet.org/Trend-Data-(Adults)/Device-Ownership.aspx.
By 2005, a multi-channel norm was clearly in place, with 87 percent of television households receiving signals from a non–over-the-air source, 67 percent of which subscribed to cable and 20 percent to satellite. Cable maintained its dominant status in 2013, though it had lost share to the telco providers—AT&T and Verizon—that began competing in selected markets with a fiber-to-the-home product. Only 19 percent of television households subscribed to digital cable in 2005, although it was available to 85 percent of wired cable homes.16 By 2012, 81 percent of cable households subscribed to digital cable.17 Digital cable allowed for advanced and two-way signal transmission between cable providers and homes that enabled more robust video-on-demand offerings and eventually, DVRs using cloud-based storage. Eighty-two percent of television homes received more than forty channels, and 40 percent received more than one hundred in 2005, a figure that increased to 58 percent by 2008. Arguably counting channels was never a good indicator of the range of content people might view. Nielsen reported in 2014 that “the average U.S. TV home now receives 189 TV channels” but watches an average of only 17 channels.18 Once broadband-distributed video became widely available around 2010, counting channels became an even less informative indicator.
The penetration of convenience devices provides one of the most marked shifts between 2005 and 2013. VCR ownership continued to decline in 2005, and was down to 87 percent. By contrast, and unsurprisingly, ownership of DVD players continued to increase, with 76 percent of homes owning a DVD player in 2005. Despite the omnipresence of DVRs in industry discussions by 2005, only 7 percent of homes had the device, which marked an increase from 4 percent in 2004.19 DVR penetration began to grow much more rapidly once the devices were integrated into the set-top boxes provided by the companies providing cable service, typically for a monthly fee. (Henceforth, the companies that provide video service—whether by cable, fiber, or satellite—will be noted as MVPDs, the common industry acronym that stands for multi-channel video programming distributor.) Twenty-six percent of homes reported they had access to video-on-demand (VOD) services in 2005, but only 11 percent reported viewing a free or pay VOD program in the previous month; the title availability at this point was most limited and emphasized theatrical film content.20 The transition to digital cable led to greater availability of the service between 2007 and 2011. Only 37 percent of homes had set-top boxes that enabled VOD in 2008, but they were in 60 percent of households by 2013.21 Notable expansion in VOD content availability and then use occurred around 2011; the measurement service Rentrak reported that free television VOD increased more than 40 percent in 2012 from the previous year.22 In 2005, 39 percent of television households owned a video game system that attached to the television. This distribution level had been steady since 2000, but began increasing as the devices added Internet connections that expanded the range of activities gaming systems could be used for and newer-generation systems such as the Wii introduced controllers allowing motion control gaming, which also expanded the gaming audience.23
In terms of the broader home technology space in 2005, 67 percent of homes had a computer, while 23 percent owned two or more, and patterns of growth in home computer ownership suggested that demand had nearly reached equilibrium.24 Eighty-eight percent of computer households (59 percent of all households) used the computer to go online, a use level that remained steady since 2001. Fifty-two percent of online households connected through a regular telephone line, while nearly half (28 percent of all households) used a broadband high-speed method, with nearly even distribution between cable modems and DSL service.25 Significant growth in access to high-speed broadband connections occurred by 2013, with 70 percent of homes connected to the Internet through a broadband connection and just two percent through dial-up, though significantly, 28 percent of homes remained without Internet access.26
This substantial gain in Internet speeds resulting from the shift to broadband, as well as the emergence of smartphones and compression technologies that enabled video to be accessed over 3G then 4G mobile data networks, provided the technological basis for the most significant adjustments in television technology. Seventy-two percent of homes owned a mobile phone by 2005, and 41 percent owned two or more.27 Though 31 percent of households had an Internet-capable mobile phone, or what were then called personal data assistants (PDAs), only 11 percent used the devices to access the Internet, and just 5 percent of mobile phone homes owned phones capable of receiving television-like video, and even fewer used this feature.28 By 2013, 65 percent of the 235 million U.S. mobile phone subscribers had a smartphone easily capable of accessing and screening video content, though this population spent only an average of 1 hour, 23 minutes per month, or 2.7 minutes per day, using their phone in this way.29
Considering television technology now requires looking beyond long-standard figures such as the number of sets and VCR penetration. As these data illustrate, Internet access and smartphone availability are just as important technological pieces to understanding post-network-era access to television content. And though notable increases are evident in the 2013 figures—so much so as to call a new era of television distribution into existence—it is important to reiterate that 28 percent of U.S. homes still had no Internet access.
Likewise, even by 2005, choice—measured by subscription to non–over-the-air providers and the number of channels available—seemed to have reached useful capacity. There always might be room for more—endlessly so, thanks to broadband-distributed video—but the average number of channels that audiences viewed suggested that few had interest in the expansion of linear channels. Nielsen estimated that despite exponential growth in availability, the number of channels viewed by a household tended to increase only slightly. A household with 31 to 40 channels viewed an average of 10.2, while those with 51 to 90 viewed just over 15. The number of channels viewed remained at 17 from 2008 through 2014, despite an increase in average channel availability from 129 to 189.30 The call for à la carte cable packaging that would allow viewers to select only the channels they desired had begun by the early 2000s, though it would take the perceived disruption of cord cutting a decade later to yield serious industry consideration.
On one hand, there was good evidence that a post-network era was emerging and that the “state” of television needed different forms of evaluation than those that had marked its quick rise to ubiquity. But there were also signs of network-era persistence: Even by 2012, aggregate Nielsen data indicated that despite nearly 50 percent DVR penetration and expanding VOD offerings, time spent viewing time-shifted content accounted for just under 8 percent of time spent viewing.31
