According to Parks Associates, 83% of smart TV owners connect their device to the Internet, up from 70% in 2014. Ownership of streaming media players has almost doubled from about 21% of U.S. broadband households in 2014 to almost 40% in 2018, while smart TV ownership has increased from 34% to 53% during the same time period.
"The rise of direct-to-consumer offerings and the blurring of lines between pay-TV and OTT are leading to increased fragmentation in the viewing experience, where consumers are having to face complex self-curating systems," said Anthony Smith-Chaigneau, senior director of product marketing, NAGRA. "To address this, service providers must become 'smartly digital' - by embracing cloudification, actively claiming the aggregation role, and leveraging data-driven principles to define and evolve their consumer propositions."