How video-on-demand tech is changing the TV landscape
Subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services such as Amazon's have
sent shockwaves through the broadcast world, as they gain millions of
new viewers each year and produce ever more of their own award-winning
content.
Netflix, the market leader, is now in over 15% of British homes, while Amazon's market share is about 5%.
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The difficulty for SVOD services in the past was that you could only
watch the programmes on a laptop or desktop, which meant they weren't
ideal for collective family viewing.
Now internet-enabled smart
TVs are bridging the gap, and new technologies, such as Amazon's Fire
Stick and Google's Chromecast, are enabling viewers to beam content
wirelessly from any connected device to their TV sets with relative
ease.
Many cable TV services, such as Virgin's Tivo, also offer Netflix as part of their packages, again widening access.
But SVOD's Achilles heel is currently internet bandwidth - or lack of it.
Average download speeds in the UK are still around 23 megabits per second (Mbps).
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And it's important to put SVOD growth numbers in context.
Such services accounted for about 3% of total UK viewing in 2014.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34050865