The average American adult spends nearly five hours a day watching television [nielsen_2016]. Watching TV is one of the daily activities in which people spend the most time (after working and sleeping) and it is by far the main entertainment activity [wallsten_2013]. Still, the way people consume TV is changing. A rising number of households are now consuming media contents on platforms other than traditional TV (e.g. Netflix, Hulu). In fact, in 2015, the TV industry registered a record number of subscription losses leading to significant media buzz about the cord-cutting phenomena (e.g. New York Times, CBC).

Providers of pay-TV services have been responding to these competitive threats by increasing the content, flexibility, interactivity, and customization of their service bundles through features such as digital video recording (DVR), automated cloud recordings (ACR), on demand services, time-shift television, and TV everywhere via over the top applications in mobile phones and tablets. These features approximate the TV viewing experience to that of the Internet and are thus called convergence technologies.

The way convergence technologies shape user’s media consumption behaviour and their effectiveness in retaining or even increasing TV’s audiences is still largely unknown and in this task, we study their impact on consumer behaviour. This task oversees a two sub tasks, the first focusing on the impact of time-shift TV on household’s media consumption behaviour and the second focusing on the emerging binge-watching behaviour and its implications for both the industry’s content distribution strategies and for and consumers.

Time-Shift TV (TSTV) is a recent technological feature that automatically records the content broadcast on TV and stores it in the cloud for a number of days without any intervention from the user. This vastly increases the amount of content available to viewers while freeing them from the restrictions of programming grids. Depending on consumers’ response to this technology, TSTV could potentially impact the valuation of programs, channels, and advertisement slots, affecting the TV supply chain in complex ways.

Binge watching refers to watching media content, usually TV shows, sequentially in one sitting. The new video streaming technologies now allow consumers to optimize their schedules and consume content at a rate never experienced before. Binge watching can potentially impact the creative process, programming and distribution strategies and business models used to monetize content.