New Stats: 33% of US Adult Internet Users Watch Full-Length TV Shows Online

The days when online video was just for “fast-food” YouTube clips are over. About 67% of US homes will have a broadband connection this year, and most importantly, a large amount of professional long-form content at their disposal. In short, watching full length TV shows online is rapidly becoming a mainstream activity.

eMarketer estimates that 33% of online adults in the US, or 58.9 million people, will watch full-length television shows online this year on a monthly basis. Among adults who already watch video regularly online, the rate is even higher, at 50%. Next year, we forecast the rate among these groups will rise to 39% and 56%, respectively. Of course, viewership is not uniform by age. A fall 2009 Anderson Analytics survey of 1000 college students reported that 69% had watched an entire TV episode or movie online within the past week.

We arrived at these estimates by looking at a number of surveys on the subject. At first glance, the response rates fall all over the map. But when differences in the survey group and frequency are accounted for, a clearer picture emerges. Approximately 25% of internet users were watching TV online in 2008 and nearly 30% in 2009.

Online viewership of full-length movies is also rising. As we recently noted in our newsletter, the percentage of Web users who streamed or downloaded this kind of long-form online video more than doubled between September 2008 and Oct 2009, according to Ipsos OTX.

While the user demand is clearly there, there are a number of competing factors on the content side that will affect the growth trajectory. On one hand, there’s Google TV, Apple TV, Roku and TiVo, who are all working feverishly to integrate web distribution directly into living-room television sets. On the other, the still-soft economy is causing publishers such as Hulu to rethink their advertising-only business model and ask for subscription fees. How these opposing factors play out will ultimately determine how fast and how soon the trend takes hold—but it’s unlikely that it will dampen the increased consumer demand for full-length video online.