Market metrics firm iSuppli says U.S. consumers are increasingly turning into online video in their living rooms: according to a survey of some 800 American consumers, 27.5 percent of televisions sold in the United States in January are connected to the Internet—and, furthermore, more than 40 percent of those televisions are Internet-enabled TVs, rather than TVs that can display content from the Internet by way of a home theater PC or gaming console.
“From video-sharing sites like YouTube, to online services like Hulu, consumers increasingly are turning to the Internet for video entertainment,” said iSuppli television systems analyst Tina Tseng, in a statement. “And these consumers want to view Internet content on their primary displays in their homes—their televisions—rather than being relegated the small screens of their desktop and notebook PCs.”
The numbers represent a substantial jump over results from a similar survey in December 2009, where 24.30 percent of respondents indicated their new televisions were connected to the Internet. Aside from Internet-enabled TVs—which, for this survey, were defined as TVs with integrated Internet capabilities like Yahoo Widgets and other lightweight client applications—game consoles were the most popular way to connect TVs to the Internet, with 20.3 percent of respondents who had hooked their new TVs to the Internet saying they did it through the likes of an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. the next most-popular connection method was by way of a Blu-ray player (13.2 percent), then home PCs and digital video boxes (like Roku or Vudo devices) tied with 12.3 percent.
Of course, put another way, 72.5 percent of TVs purchased by U.S. consumers in January 2010 aren’t tapping into Internet-based content at all.
