Some well-timed research out from NPD, just in time for Google gearing up for its I/O event, where it is announcing news about Google TV, new wireless devices and Android. The researchers say that TV consumption on tablets has more than doubled in the last year in the 14 markets that it surveys, and 70 percent of consumers now say they watch video on devices other than TVs. The device leading the charge — or change, as the case may be? PCs; tablets still accounting for less than 15 percent of TV consumption.
TV, meanwhile, still ranks as the single most-used device for watching television, accounting for the other 30 percent of TV viewing.
In its Global TV Replacement Study, which surveyed 14,000 TV owners, NPD noted that there was a clear delineation between developed and developing markets when it came to new platforms for TV. Users in the U.S., UK and Germany are using tablets and notebook PCs far more than consumers in China, Russia and Turkey, where smartphones are more likely to be the most popular devices, primarily because many tablets are not equipped with cellular connections, and users in the latter countries are more likely to have mobile data plans than they are fixed broadband.
But this, too, appears to be changing even in developing markets. NPD notes that Turkey happens to be the fastest-growing country for tablet usage among those that it surveyed. In 2011, only 3.1 percent of consumers had tablets and now that penetration is up to 16.5 percent.
Also it’s worth wondering how the overall standings on usage will change in the year ahead. While Strategy Analytics earlier today pointed out that mobile handset growth globally is slowing down, tablets are still at an earlier stage of that adoption cycle and therefore have a lot more room for growth. Even among more mature markets, France and the U.S. increased threefold, and Germany was up fourfold over the year, NPD notes. That makes Google’s ramped up presence in tablets and TV all the more timely.
But given the growth in mobile device usage, the more traditional TV set market, meanwhile, is not looking as bad as you would think: NPD notes that TV replacement cycles have actually sped up over the last year, with consumers looking for fancier features like HD and larger screens (LCD being the most popular choice for flat-screens, the researchers say) — at competitive prices. So for now it looks like the TV revolution will not (quite yet) be televised.
[Image: Sami Niemela, Flickr]