According to a survey in the latest edition of Digital Life Canada quarterly, more Canadian TV's are ready for Internet movie content. Further, game consoles (Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii) are in nearly half of Canadian Internet-enabled households. Of these, over half are Internet enabled and connected to the living room TV for online gaming and movies. Around 23 percent of Canadian households connect a laptop or another computer to their main TVs (8 percent all the time, 15 percent sometimes) when they need to watch something on the big screen.
In total, over one-third (35 percent) of TVs in Canadian households are connected to the Internet at least some of the time, either via game consoles or laptops, and 47 percent of Internet using Canadians say that they now prefer to rent movies online rather than going to the video store (up from 33 percent from a year ago).
Among Internet-connected Canadians under 35, a majority (51 percent) say they have connected a laptop or an Internet-enabled game console to their TVs. According to the study, 80 percent of Canadians are aware that Netflix is available and 8 percent of those people used the free trial at some point; Netflix is expecting to cross the 1 million paying subscriber threshold by this summer. Another Internet-based movie service, Cineplex, was also familiar to 17 percent of respondents, with one-in-ten claiming to have used the service.
The findings come from the SRG's independent Digital Life Canada syndicated study, and are based on quarterly interviews with 1,000 respondents 12 years old and and older. The latest round of interviews were conducted in early January 2011.
Why does this study matter? Well it shows that usage based billing is a horrible idea in Canada where streaming movie and television are just now gaining a foothold.
Source: SRGNet
Comments
Re: Survey: Canadians Warming Up To Streaming Content
This is great news. I prefer to rent movies on Amazon VoD and plan to buy one more roku streaming player at best price from Amazon.com.
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Re: Survey: Canadians Warming Up To Streaming Content
I can guarantee you those numbers would be even higher if we didn't have such fucking horrible usage caps. Seriously, the biggest cap you can get from Rogers cable Internet is 175 GB and that's only with the top tier 50 Mbps plan that's $100/month. If you want something more reasonably priced, like say 10 or 15 Mbps, you get stuck with a 60 or 80 GB cap respectively. TekSavvy just raised their caps from 200 GB to 300 GB to celebrate the (temporary) defeat of UBB about a month ago, but only if you're among the lucky 5% of Canadians who has access to their services. Even fucking Comcast has higher caps. We're a fucking backwater when it comes to Internet access, though nobody will admit it.
Re: Survey: Canadians Warming Up To Streaming Content
What you means is that it shows UBB is horrible for Canadian consumers, great for Canadian telecoms.