Comscore Report Charts OTT Gains Amid COVID-19

Between April 2019 and April 2020, the number of OTT homes in the U.S. rose by 5.2 million, according to Comscore’s 2020 State of OTT report.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Comscore says there has been a spike in OTT engagement that is holding steady. Consumption on OTT services experienced “exceptional growth” through March and April and has since plateaued.

In April 2020, 69.8 million homes used OTT services, with the average home viewing 102 hours of OTT content that month. This is an increase of 17 hours compared with April 2019.

Another key finding is that the growth in reach of ad-supported services is outpacing that of non-ad-supported services; ad-supported services grew by 9 percent between January 2020 and April 2020, while SVOD services were up 5 percent.

Total viewing across live TV, DVR, VOD and OTT in April 2020 rose by 2.3 billion hours from April 2019 to April 2020, with 1.4 billion hours from OTT alone. The “Big 5″—Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, Hulu and Disney+—accounted for 82.5 percent of OTT streaming hours in April 2020.

Comscore also reports that 21 percent of connected TV viewing homes are cord-cutters, up by 3 percent from April 2019. Meanwhile, 21 percent are cord-nevers, also up by 3 percent on the year-ago period. And the use of pure-play virtual MVPDs was up 70 percent on April 2019.