Consumers in American OTT-capable homes are spending nearly one-fifth of their TV time streaming content, according to new data from Nielsen, and they’re ready to take on additional subscriptions.

The figure is contained in a special Streaming Wars edition of the Nielsen Total Audience Report which reveals that streaming accounts for 19% of total usage of TV in these homes.

Netflix is the most popular source, cited by 31% of those streaming content, followed by YouTube (21%), Hulu (12%) and Amazon Prime (8%); ‘others’ make up the remaining 28%.

Six in ten Americans subscribe to more than one paid video streaming service, and as a wave of new entrants hits the market, 93% say they will either increase or keep their existing streaming services.

Given the potential for subscription fatigue, 84% cite cost as the most important video streaming attribute. And respondents are conscious of whether or not they are getting value: 42% said the reason they cancelled a service is because they didn’t use it enough to justify the cost.

They’re also focused on the user experience: ease of use (81%) was the second most important attribute – a reminder to OTT services of the need to keep navigation and content discovery simple.

Variety of content (79%) ranked only third in importance, but as Nielsen noted, “content is what ultimately gets [users] to type out their credit card number and hit ‘Enter’”.

And content is central to the reasons consumers give for paying for additional streaming services, whether that’s to expand the content available to them (47%), to watch programs they can’t find anywhere else (37%) or to watch a particular program they’ve heard about (37%).

Content can be a double-edged sword, however, as 20% of respondents also said they’d cancelled a service after watching all the content that they were interested in.

The news for advertisers, meanwhile, is mixed as around half of those surveyed were looking for the ability to skip ads (52%) or for a totally ad-free environment (48%).

Sourced from Nielsen; additional content by WARC staff