More viewing happening on mobile, connected TV devices

Streaming TV grew sharply in the second quarter, according to a new report from Conviva, which found that content consumption more than doubled over the last 12 months.

Viewing hours rose 115% to 5.52 billion and the number of plays rose 102% to 17.2 billion.

Peak concurrent plays were up 118% to 8 million during the World Cup. Game 7 of the NBA Western Conference Finals had 5.3 million concurrent plays.

“These spikes demonstrate that sports continue to drive ‘appointment TV’ – even in the streaming TV space,” the report said. "They create opportunities, but they also create massive load on the video delivery ecosystem, which much continue to improve in order to meet growing demand."

Viewing is growing faster in apps than in browsers, with in-app viewing yours up 72%, compared to 31% for browsers.

The device landscape continues to evolve towards mobile and connected TVs. The trend is away from PCs and towards phones and tablets, particularly for short –form content, the report said. For long-form content consumers prefer larger screens and connected TVs.

In terms of share of total plays, mobile devices had 49% of all plays, followed by TV with 27%. PCs has 24%.

Among connected TV platform, Roku is the leader with 8% of all plays. Sony Playstation Vue and Google’s Chromecast had the fasted growth at about 150%.

Related: Pay TV Subscriber Losses Drop to 305K in Q1

PCs’ share of viewing hour dropped 6 percentage points to 20%. Connected TV’s added 4 percentage points.

The quality of streams is improving, which is helping grow engagement, the report said. Globally, additional improvements in stream quality are important and better streams would translate into better monetization for publishers and for distributors.

The video failure rate fell 16% to 2.69 % and the video start time sped up by 14% to 4.16 seconds.

Nevertheless between videos that failed to start and videos that viewers exited before they were done, there were nearly 1 billion lost viewing hours.

Conviva is the real-time measurement and intelligence platform for many of the world’s largest streaming TV publishers. In North America, Conviva measures four out of the top five vMVPDs, and five out of the top 10 SVOD providers. Globally, on an annualized basis, the Conviva sensor is installed in 3 billion streaming video applications for over 200 brands