• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, May 14, 2014

A new online survey from Mixpo of 130 U.S media planners and buyers shows the quiet and impressive growth of the OTT content market to advertisers.

Those buyers—an overwhelming 75% of them—say connected TV deserves to be part of media plans either right now or within a year from now.

The survey also points out some interesting here-and-now facts. Mixpo’s polling finds 18% of the buyers purchase connected TV advertising right now, buying it from firms like YuMe, TubeMogul or Hulu.

But significantly, of those who aren’t buying OTT, 65% of them say they just wouldn’t know how to if they wanted to.

Mixpo’s Walter Harp, the vice president of product marketing for the multiscreen ad company, pinpoints the problems stopping over the top from, well, going over the top:  

*Marketers really don’t have easy access to the inventory, and opportunities to buy inventory are fragmented; 

*Not all connected devices work the same—in fact, none of them do, it seems—which makes it tough to measure campaigns;

*Connected TV doesn’t have the same standards of measurement than even online ads get from IAB;

*And connected TV is in the neither-fish-nor-fowl category when it comes to analytics. It’s not online video, and it’s not TV. While that may ultimately be a plus, it seems from this survey that buyers think it just confuses the data they do receive.  

The report from Mixpo mixes it neatly with new research that at the rate things are going, it won’t be long before more hours will be spent watching online video on a TV set, not on a PC. That data meshes with Mixpo’s findings that advertisers need to find connected TV to follow where a good portion of online viewers are spending their time.

Parks Associates today said the amount of online video seen via a TV screen went up to 3 hours per week in the first quarter of this year, up from 2.3 hours in the same quarter in 2013.  Matching up those quarters for PC viewing of videos, time spent fell from 8 hours in 2013 to 6.2 hours in the first quarter of 2014.

“In addition to smart TVs, Blu-ray players and game consoles, consumers are also buying streaming media players and devices such as Google's Chromecast,” stated Brett Sappington, the Parks director of research. “Pay-TV providers are making a strong push to extend TV Everywhere to a variety of devices. These trends are converging to displace computer-based video consumption.”

The new Parks research says 81% of U.S. broadband households watch video on a TV and only 60% on a PC, 31% on a smartphone and 28% on a tablet. The only device with any significant decline in the last year is the PC.

pj@mediapost.com