Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

DirecTV is making an Android-powered streaming box. What gives?

“If (AT&T) had a box that came in at $35 or under, consumers would be interested,” Brett Sappington told me. He’s the senior director of research at Parks Associates, which pays extremely close attention to the over-the-top (OTT) — meaning Internet-based TV — space. “They’d buy it just to see if it worked.”

Sappington reasons that a new streaming box isn’t dead on arrival, so long as it has a stellar user interface, is feature-rich, is open to all TV app developers and is relatively cheap. An existing DirecTV Now customer, for instance, may be compelled to test out the company’s box if it promises better streaming performance — say, no buffering during any live streams — and comes with some sort of service-plus-box deal.

From the article "DirecTV is making an Android-powered streaming box. What gives?" by Jennifer Van Grove.

Previously In The News

Over 70% of TV viewing by young not TV or live-streaming

TV-viewing research from Parks Associates finds that live TV viewing among all video consumption has continued to decline overall among US broadband households – nearly 60 per cent of video viewed on...

User experience key focus for smart TVs and SMPs

A Parks Associates report finds that makers of smart TVs and streaming media players (SMPs) are shifting strategies to focus on the user experience (UX) as device sales start to flatten out. Accord...

Google continues to ignore the Chromecast, the best product it ever made

The numbers also suggest customers, at least in the United States, have begun to pick Roku and Amazon over Google. A study by Parks Associates found that the Chromecast now makes up only 11% of the me...

One in 10 smart home device owners report unresolved technical problems

Smart home devices are supposed to make our lives easier, but if they suddenly stop working without warning, they can end up doing just the opposite. According to new research, more than one in 10 peo...