iPad Owners Love Video, Smartphone Owners Shrug

Tablet owners are watching shows and YouTube clips at a rapid pace, foretelling a new age of video consumption

Whether you’re Ridley Scott, Matthew Weiner or Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes, the latest study from comScore reveals the tablet will be central to the future of your television shows, films and other video.

In tracking tablet usage over the first few months of the year, the analytics company found that 53 percent of tablet owners watched video at least once a month and almost 10 percent of them watched video "almost every day."

Tablet ownership and usage has ballooned ever since the introduction of the iPad, and those numbers suggest watching video is a core experience for the tablet audience.

The same cannot be said for mobile, where just 20 percent of owners watch video each month and less than three percent each day.

“Tablets are one of the most rapidly adopted consumer technologies in history and are poised to fundamentally disrupt the way people engage with the digital world both on-the-go, and perhaps most notably, in the home,” Mark Donovan, comScore SVP of Mobile said in a statement. “It’s not surprising to see that once consumers get their hands on their first tablet, they are using them for any number of media habits including TV viewing.”

Also read: VH1 Offers Martin Scorsese and Bob Dylan on Your iPad

Making this boom in video streaming on the tablet more significant is the fact that the most avid tablet users come from the demographics advertisers covert. Almost 50 percent of tablet owners are between the ages of 25 and 44, and about 75 percent are between the ages of 18 and 55.

They are also big earners, with 37.7 percent of tablet owners earning more than $100,000 a year.

Media companies have been searching for the ideal recipe to capitalize on the proliferation of video online. Is it producing video for portals like YouTube and Yahoo? Is it licensing content to Netflix? Is it setting up standalone apps like HBO Go?

The answer remains unclear – and it could be a combination of the above.

Whatever the strategy, the opportunity in providing quality video for the tablet is more evident than ever.

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