About 20% of game console owners buy TV shows or movies once a month

Gamers are paying for TV shows and movies on their game consoles, but not as much as the movies companies might like. A survey of thousands of viewers shows that about 20.2 percent of game console owners purchase TV shows and movies on a monthly basis.

That’s up 1.5 percent from a year ago and up 4.1 percent over two years. But the number of purchases are relatively low. About 16.2 percent of respondents who own a game console purchase about one to three videos per month. Only 14.2 percent of respondents access their pay-TV provider’s app on their gaming device, down 1.9 percent from the previous quarter.

Overall, the survey found that 48 percent of respondents owned a game console in the third quarter of 2015, up 3.4 percent over two years. Digitalsmiths, a Tivo division that provides discovery and analytics for top U.S. pay-TV providers, created the report based on a survey from 3,150 viewers. The data is part of Digitalsmiths’ Q3 2015 Video Trends report released today.

Digitalsmiths suggests that pay-TV providers should focus on the 32.6 percent of respondents who could access the app but are choosing not to do so. Those customers could be hit with personalized, targeted promotions that show them how to do it.

The viewing habits of game console owners.
The viewing habits of game console owners.

 

 

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.