Survey says: we are a Netflix (S NFLX) nation.
Forty-seven percent of all U.S. households subscribe to Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon (S AMZN) Prime or a combination of these services, and 49 percent of all households have at least one TV connected to the internet, according to a new study from the Leichtman Research Group about emerging video services. Four years ago, only 24 percent of all households had an internet-connected TV.
That combination of connected TVs and internet video subscriptions is increasingly shaping what we are watching. Forty-nine percent of all Netflix subscribers watch online video programming on a connected device every week, compared to only eight percent of viewers who don't subscribe to Netflix. And 78 percent of all Netflix subscribers watch their videos on a TV.
Thirty-four percent of the people quizzed for this study said that they watch online video every day, and 61 percent do so every week.
The big and hotly debated question is once again: What effect does all of this have on cable TV? Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has said time and again that his company's service is complementary to, and not replacing, traditional pay TV -- but the Leichtman Research numbers seem to suggest that is is starting to change: In 2010, 88 percent of Netflix subscribers also had pay TV. Fast forward to 2014, and that number is down to 80 percent.
At the same time, the number of cord cutters who also subscribe to Netflix is rising, from 16 percent in 2010 to 48 percent in 2014.
Leichtman's numbers are echoed by a recent Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) study about the market for U.S. television services. 45 percent of all U.S. TV households watch internet content on their TVs, according to that study. The use of internet TV programming steeply increased from 28 percent in 2013.
Only five million U.S. TV households rely exclusively on internet TV, according to the CEA, but 10 percent of all TV households said that they're likely to cancel that service in the next 10 months. Altogether, a total of 17 million TV households already don't subscribe to traditional pay TV, but instead rely on antennas, the internet or a combination of both for TV programming.