UK VOD users rail against ‘rigid’ linear TV

Joseph O'Halloran | 24-10-2012

A survey by UK regulator Ofcom of the nation’s growing video on demand user base has discovered negative attitudes towards linear TV appear to be strengthening.

Furthermore, VOD users are voicing increasing frustration with linear TV’s inherent rigid schedule and are taking the view that the quality of the content on offer from linear TV services has clearly deteriorated since 2009 when Ofcom last undertook a major study of the VOD market.

Attempting to uncover new findings about the VOD market and discover how the landscape has evolved since the 2009 survey, Ofcom found that VOD viewers watched on-demand content with a higher level of engagement than for linear TV. Respondents indicated that they were going to on-demand services as a conscious choice/destination, and therefore this active viewing experience was valued more than linear TV, which by contrast was sometimes viewed in a passive manner and in some cases is simply put on as background noise.

The research found that participants selected linear TV and the on-demand services they used according to three main factors: mood, to relax, be informed, indulge themselves, or share; context, who they are with, the time of day and where they are; content, e.g. the genre, the length and the topicality of the programme.

It also found that the age / life stage of the participant, their ‘tech savviness’ and the types and range of media devices that they owned also played a part in their choice of watching either on-demand or linear TV services. As a result, when participants were asked to sort the audiovisual services they used, in terms of importance to them, and frequency of use, many of them had sophisticated views that made it hard to create a typical hierarchy; different services fulfilled different needs, dependent on factors such as mood, context and content.

The study also asked participants their views on a range of on-demand services, in terms of whether they tended to consider them as reasonable substitutes for linear TV. The participants were asked to consider what would affect their choice of these online services in comparison to choosing a linear TV channel.

Ofcom identified ten factors that tended to inform choice when participants made decisions on whether they tended to consider that an on-demand service was a reasonable substitute for linear TV or not. These comprise purpose of the service, look and feel of the service, frequency with which content is refreshed on the service, who controls what is watched, effort expended to find the service, viewing experience, length of content, volume of content, perceived quality of content and where the content originated.