Feeling overwhelmed by the deluge of TV and streaming choices available at the push of a button? You’re not alone.
The tonnage of video programming available to American viewers today is staggering – and it will only grow. As of February 2022, there were more than 817,000 unique program titles on traditional television and streaming services in the United States, with many of those titles featuring hundreds of individual episodes or chapters, according to the metadata subsidiary. Gracenote entertainment system from Nielsen. That’s a 26% increase from December 2019, when there were just over 646,000 unique program titles.
With the huge amount of content, nearly half of US viewers – 46% – said they feel “overwhelmed” by the growing number of services and platforms, making it harder to find the content they want. research, according to Nielsen’s inaugural “State of Play Report” released Wednesday.
Of those polled by Nielsen, 64% of respondents said they wished there was a “bundled video streaming service” that would let them choose the video streaming services they wanted.
That said, 93% of Americans expect to either increase their paid streaming services or leave their existing plans unchanged in the next year. According to Nielsen’s February survey, 35% of Americans now pay for four or more streaming services, up from 11% who did so in 2019.
And more than half of US viewers (53%) now pay at least $20 per month for video streaming services, according to the Nielsen study.
Overall, Americans increased their average weekly video streaming time by 18%, with a year-over-year increase from 143.2 billion minutes in February 2021 to 169.4 billion minutes in February 2022.
In February 2022, content from streaming platforms accounted for nearly 29% of consumers’ total time with TV, ahead of broadcast programming (26.4%) for the fourth consecutive month, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge, a monthly snapshot of total TV and streaming usage. . In total, Americans watched nearly 15 million years of streaming video content in 2021, according to the measurement company’s estimates.
The report “really underscores the fact that we’ve entered the next phase of streaming, based on the streaming trends we’ve detailed over the past few years,” said Brian Fuhrer, senior vice president of product strategy. at Nielsen. “We went from infancy to adolescence, and all the complexities one would expect at that time.”
The 2022 “State of Play” report (downloadable at this link) incorporates measurement and streaming data from Nielsen TV, as well as data from its Gracenote unit and results from a custom online survey of US video streamers.
