An Experiment in Understanding Kids Cross-Platform Consumption

Summary

A committee of CIMM on kids’ video consumption commissioned TiVo and Reality Mine to conduct an experiment to measure the cross-platform media consumption of 2-17 year-olds. The experiment was intended to help the industry develop a methodology and set of practices for measuring this segment’s screen usage. Reality Mine recruited a panel of TiVo’s Power Watch Panel homes with kids and installed meters on both the kids’ devices and the routers in the home. Reality Mine’s Home Router Meter captures all the digital behavior in the home that requires internet connectivity. This meter, along with Reality Mine’s device meters, enabled Reality Mine to measure the television viewed by the kids on the sets in their homes, along with viewing on the kids’ mobile devices, tablets, and PCs and the household’s game consoles. The Router Meter also captured viewing of OTT services. There were 100 homes in Phase 1 of this study. Preliminary Phase 1 findings reported here:

• On weekdays, about one third of the kids’ TV viewing was live, jumping to half of all weekend TV viewing. Most of the remainder was time-shifted, rather than streaming.
• Kids 6-11 spent a greater proportion of their viewing time on tablets than kids 2-5 or 12-17.
• Tablet & smartphone video consumption by time of day follow similar patterns to TV on weekdays, but not on weekends.

CIMM planned on a Phase 2 with 500 homes over 3 months in which they hoped to address some of the challenges of Phase 1 – panel recruitment, child check-in compliance, and how to define in-tab. They also planned a facial recognition test in Phase 2.