Report: Audiences Gobbling Up Native Smart TV Apps

Smart TV interfaces have improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years, making the home screen the primary entry point for consumer content decisions in a sea of apps from publishers both large and small.

And as the rise of streaming continues (and according to Inscape’s new Q3 2023 Market Trends Report, accounts for nearly 55.9% of consumers' share of viewing time), there has been a venerable explosion of smart TV apps that funnel a diverse amount of content to viewers.

In the report, Inscape notes that the average number of apps used per smart TV has doubled, with viewers in Q3 2023 using an average of 5.4 — up from 2.6 in Q4 2021. Even as recently as Q1 2023, viewers were using 4.5 apps, so there’s a clear hunger to utilize more of these native apps to access content natively.

There could be more growth coming as well. As Inscape shares, the wide adoption of smart TVs is fueling a fundamental change in how audiences are consuming content. From Q4 2021 through Q3 2023, the share of viewers who only stream content (through native apps or other methods) has increased from 45% to 54%.

Meanwhile, the percentage that only use cable/satellite/OTA has shrunk from 9% to just 5%.

Though a sizeable share of smart TV viewers are still watching via both streaming AND traditional inputs, that group is declining as well — 46% in Q4 2021 to 41% in Q3 2023.

The data indicates a shift in how consumers interact with streaming content, and how it should be viewed by advertisers and publishers alike. Streaming is no longer a “new frontier” for content. Audiences have arrived en masse, and are now entrenched in the streaming ecosystem. So advertisers and publishers would be wise to meet them there, even if still keeping a foot in traditional pay TV like cable/satellite/OTA.