Tablets boom

Whether you’re Ridley Scott, Matthew Weiner or Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes, the latest study from comScore reveals the tablet will be central to the future of your television shows, films and other video.
 
The analytics company found in a survey that 53 per cent of tablet owners watched videos at least once a month and almost 10 per cent watched them ‘almost every day’.

Tablet ownership and usage has ballooned ever since the introduction of the iPad and those numbers suggest watching videos is a core experience for the tablet audience.
 
The same cannot be said for mobile phones, where just 20 per cent of owners watch videos each month and less than three per cent watch them each day.
 
“Tablets are one of the most rapidly-adopted consumer technologies in history and are poised to fundamentally disrupt the way people engage with the digital world both on-the-go, and perhaps most notably, in the home,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile technology. “It’s not surprising to see that once consumers get their hands on their first tablet, they are using them for any number of media habits including TV viewing.”

Making this boom in video streaming on the tablet more significant is the fact that the most avid tablet users come from the demographics advertisers covert. Almost 50 per cent of tablet owners are between the ages of 25 and 44, and about 75 per cent are between 18 and 55.

They are also big earners, with 37.7 per cent of tablet owners earning more than BD38,000-a-year.

Media companies have been searching for the ideal recipe to capitalise on the proliferation of video online. Is it producing video for portals like YouTube and Yahoo? Is it licensing content to Netflix? Is it setting up standalone apps like HBO Go?

The answer remains unclear - and it could be a combination of the above. Whatever the strategy, the opportunity in providing quality video for the tablet is more evident than ever.