The Apple TV Sees Explosive Growth In 1st Quarter 2018

Luke Bouma

6 years ago

For years the Apple TV has struggled to break out of fourth place behind Roku, the Fire TV, and Chromecast in the United States. Although the device has sold, the all-important home use segment has always lagged behind in the United States.

Even our own surveys show the Apple TV is far behind some of their competitors in the cord cutting community.

Now Conviva has released a report that shows the Apple TV viewership is up 709% in the 1^st quarter 2018 vs the 1^st quarter 2017.

“Because the complexity and viewership of our customers’ services are growing so fast, they can no longer rely on a sample-set of thousands when they are dealing with billions,” said Dr. Hui Zhang, co-founder & CEO of Conviva. “Things have changed quite a bit since Nielsen assembled a panel of viewers to analyze television. Conviva’s all-screen census measurement approach provides a unique perspective for understanding the dynamic landscape of viewership, content consumption and user experience across internet streaming services.”

The data captured covers quantities like number of streams played, viewing hours, devices and regions, and quality metrics like video start time, buffering time, and bit rate. These metrics are the key KPIs for the world’s largest OTT publishers looking to deliver perfect streaming experiences for their viewers.

During the same time Conviva says Roku saw a rise of 87% in total viewing hours. One interesting note was that Android viewing hours are growing at a rate of two and a half times that of iOS devices.

So what is happening here? It’s hard to say, but it is likely that now that the Apple TV has many of the apps their competitors offer many Apple TV owners are finding more use for their device. It’s hard to remember that just two years ago most live TV streaming services did not stream on the Apple TV. In the last few months Vudu and Amazon also both released their streaming services on the Apple TV.

Hopefully, Apple continues to try and make it easier for streaming services to put their content on the Apple TV.

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