US video consumption is on the rise on all three available screens – TV, the Internet and mobile - according to a new report from Nielsen. The most significant increases are in time-shifting, usage of which is up 37% year-on-year, and mobile video consumption, which is up 52% .

The average American watches 153 hours of TV at home every month (or five hours a day) as Nielsen reported in its Q1 2009 Three Screen Report. In addition to TV watching, the 131 million Americans who watch online video consume three hours of video a month and the 13.4 million Americans who watch video on mobile phones consume 3.5 hours of mobile video each month.

Traditional TV is still dominant, accounting for almost 99% of all video watched in the US. TV watching increases with age. Adults aged 65 and over watch 210 hours of TV a month, double the amount of time spent by teens between the ages of 12 and 17. The most avid users of time-shifting are adults between the ages of 25 and 34, who spend an average of 12 hours a month watching time-shifted video.

Teens between the ages of 13 and 17 are the leading users of mobile video, logging an average of 6.5 hours a month, according to Nielsen.

The report notes that online video audiences are likely to grow as broadband penetration in the US increases and consumers upgrade to PCs capable of supporting decent quality video.

Pay-TV will continue to grow in 2009

Global pay-TV subscriber numbers will increase by 8% in 2009, despite the economic crisis, according to the first quarter update of Pyramid Research's Media Forecast. That represents a drop of 3% from the 11% growth in 2008.

There will be almost 733 million pay-TV subscribers at the end of the year, according to the forecast.

While commenting that first quarter results had been better than anticipated, research manager Ozgur Aytar cautioned that "the more significant impact of the recession will be felt in customer spending on pay-TV services in 2009." Average expenditure per pay-TV household will decrease by 6% in 2009 and by as much as 20% in some emerging markets, as operators roll out "economy" bundles and multi-play tariffs.

"The slowdown in the global economy has hit both capex and the speed of broadband network deployments in emerging markets," Aytar said. "In order to manage through the perfect storm, operators are scaling back their capex by as much as 20% to 30% and most are holding back on expansion plans."

Mixed views on the state of IPTV

Researchers seem to be having a hard time figuring out how the global economic crisis is affecting pay-TV in general and IPTV in particular.

Predicting bad times ahead, international consulting group Frost & Sullivan has revised its previous forecast of three-year compound annual growth for IPTV from 29% down to less than 15%.

ABI Research, on the other hand, has reaffirmed a three-year CAGR of 29%, forecasting that IPTV will achieve 47 million subscribers by the end of 2011. The current concentration of subscribers in bandwidth-rich countries such as France, South Korea and Hong Kong will spread as networks improve in countries such as China and India, the company said in its quarterly Pay-TV Subscriptions report.

The number of global IPTV subscribers at the end of 2008 stood at anywhere between 15.5 million (according to Point Topic) and 19.6 million (according to Gartner). Growth has been best in Europe, where Pyramid Research predicts that IPTV subscribers will account for 15% of the total pay-TV subscriber base by the end of 2009. Elsewhere in the world, IPTV subscribers will account for less than 5% of the total market.

Half of UK TV households choose pay-TV

Almost half of all TV households in the UK now pay for access to additional television channels, according to research from the regulator Ofcom.

49.5% of UK TV households have a pay satellite or cable service on their main television set, up from 48.6% in the previous quarter, Ofcom revealed in its Digital Progress Report for the fourth quarter of 2008. That compares with 39.3% of households which have free television services through digital satellite or digital terrestrial television (DTT).

In all, 88.8% of households in the UK had a digital TV service connected to their main TV set at the end of 2008, up by 2.4% since the end of 2007.

Homes with access to a High Definition (HD) service rose to an all-time high of over 1.5 million.