OTT Growing, but Live TV Holding On

The advent of over-the-top content and the evolving nature of consumer habits has a lot of small cable operators wondering what the end game is for live, linear pay TV services. A new report from Nielsen's shows the shift toward OTT and non-live viewing is continuing, but traditional viewing is still surprisingly strong.

As the story in Light Reading points out:

Clearly OTT, on-demand consumption is growing among US viewers. So why is this a dilemma for pay-TV providers? Because, despite these declines, live TV continues to account for close to 80% of time spent consuming video per week (based on our calculations using Nielsen's data). If we include DVR and network DVR-based viewing, that goes up to 90%.

In other words, it may be a number of years before enough consumers have totally "cut the cord" to make it feasible for operators to stop providing live, linear pay TV.