comScore, Inc. (SCOR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. The doors are open. Everyone is coming in. If you're here for the State of Streaming webinar, you are in the right spot. A couple of things we'll cover off in the first minute here, some housekeeping as folks dial in, get their audio, making sure that they can hear us correctly and everything. This is a very exciting webinar. The team behind the scenes have worked very hard at pulling together a lot of key messages for you that I think are really going to resonate. We talked briefly in an e-mail to you all just about a day or 2 ago when we asked what was the top thing that was front and center for you, macro trends and the overall landscape, very important. So I'm very pleased to announce that's going to be very much front and center for today's webinar. As folks dial in, get connected on their various devices, which is still apropos for the State of Streaming. Some housekeeping notes here. This webinar is being recorded. A copy of the recording as well as the PowerPoint presentation will be made available to you. It's going to come directly into your inboxes, so you don't have to look for it. It will show up there within the next day. So very excited about that. So don't worry if you miss something along the way. Everybody here is in listen-only mode. There are a lot of you. So we ask that you use the chat function down at the bottom. The team behind the scenes who are making us all look very good up here on camera, we'll make sure that those get filtered to us, and I will make sure to try and pepper our speaker at the end with some Q&A. And there is a poll at the end. It is very important to us to hear your feedback along the way. So I just want to make sure you stick around all the way to the end to capture your voice in the discussion. So with that said, my name is Jason. I am the Director of Partner Insights here at comScore, and I'm thrilled to welcome you to our annual comScore State of Streaming webinar. There are a lot of folks on this webinar that may not be completely familiar with everything that comes for currently does in the marketplace outside of this. So real briefly, I just want to sort of touch upon this sort of end-to-end global footprint that we get to talk to you all about today as part of the storytelling process. With data, it's one of those things where you can look at the numbers, but there's so many stories behind those numbers. They're people, they're audiences, just like you and I, who have the opportunity to make a difference in the things that are meaningful and relevant to us. comScore really sits at the heartbeat of that globally. Whether it's the pre-fill side, whether you're planning a campaign, activating on that campaign and trying to think about the audiences that are being reached, whether you're trying to measure your activations and how you're performing against your own KPIs, or whether or not you're looking for insights that can transform how your business, your advertisers, publishers and brands, the like. It really starts with this sort of idea that the data can only work if you have the scale to do so at a global, national, regional footprint, right? So it's about taking that big data and driving it down into the things that are most meaningful and relevant to you with precision from a methodology that is currency grade. So I think you'll find that today's webinar will be quite exciting as we sort of dive in to some of that data. And that brings me to this wonderful opportunity that I have to introduce to you the man who has really sort of harnessed all this data together and threaded it into a beautiful story. I have the privilege of calling him a colleague. You have the privilege of having him as your expert for the next little bit. James Muldrow, Vice President of Product Management. James I'm excited for this one. Good to have you here, sir.

Well, thank you very much, Jason. And before I get started, I just want to say thank you to everyone for joining in the audience, but also everyone behind the scenes. As Jason mentioned, there are a lot of people that create this data. I am maybe the mouse piece today, but there are hundreds of employees that come for and even more of our clients and our publisher partners that really give us all of the abilities to do that we get to present today. So with no further ado, let me start with talking about what I'm going to talk about. We've got a packed agenda, so we've got a lot to go through. But I'm going to go through some macro trends, as Jason mentioned. I want to then dive in deeper and to talk about the what we'll call the age of ad supported. There's a lot that we can dive into there. But there are plenty of emerging trends that are on the horizon or really just getting started or really getting to their peak. I want to walk through those. And then take like a step back and remember that everything that we talked about today does go back to what Jason mentioned, there are so many components to the entire process of planning, execution, performance measurement and insights that I wanted to touch some, some of the points that we can see with streaming that related to those. And then key you takeaways, and we'll take some Q&A. Hopefully, we've got time at the end. So to kick things off, let's talk about the landscape, consumption trends, and these are your macro views of the world. We want to start, I think, looking very high level. Where do we spend our time? And when you think about digital platforms, yes, they certainly dominate from the perspective of entertainment consumption. But there's a huge component and when you look at some data that we have at comScore that's taking our digital and our television assets and looking at the times that the hours spent over the course of the entire year of last year. Linear TV took up a lot of devices. But connected TV and online vehicle also took a lot. But then we got these other components. We spend a lot of time that is not watching video, that is just on our devices, on our phones, looking at website, using apps during our normal daily lives. And these are all perspectives and aspects of how we can go about looking at the time that we consume. And when we think about that, what I want to now turn us to is to focus more on the video components because that's really where the State of Streaming is going to concentrate and where we really want to bring our attention today. So if we look at video overall, and this is digital video, there's been this steady rise in the trajectory of growth for a very long time and it keeps going. We still are looking at between the last couple of years that we do, just look at 2020 versus 2021 and 2022. Back in 2020, compared to what we did last year, a 51% increase in the amount of just streams that are going out there on online video, whether that's on desktop or mobile or CTV. But this is continuing that expectation. And if we look at digital video, it continues on this upward momentum. Where is this upward momentum leading us to? Well, part of online video is if we're consuming content online, are we consuming it in the same way that we may have been in the past on linear. The answer is, to a lesser degree. One of the items that we found just fascinating is that within the household, CTV has presented a lot of opportunities for streaming. But as streaming draws in consumers, traditional cable and satellite subscriptions, those have taken some hits. And I think this has been a topic of discussion in the industry for a while. But over the last year, we have actually observed that the number of households that are cordless has ticked over the 60% mark and specifically the number of cord-cutters, meaning households that had a cable or satellite subscription that decided to move away from that in favor of streaming. That has been increasing over the time. But ultimately, this year, we saw that it actually eclipsed the number of subscribing households. Now that is certainly not necessarily a bad thing for the consumer. Consumers are looking for content where they want it. But we have to shift our ideas about when we think about linear versus digital is really how is the consumer doing those shares of ours. And what does that mean for those that need to monetize or want to monetize against those audiences. When we think about...

Hey, Jason...?

Yes.

Can I just clarify one thing for you. So on that slide, when you're talking online video, when you're defining linear TV versus connected TV, can you just help me understand what we -- what the online video component of that is just for the viewers?

Yes. Yes, sure. And on this slide, what the online video components really is, is going to be the consumption of video that's streaming, but either in your -- when we say digital, we mean on your desktop or mobile device. So you're sitting in your home and you're wanting Netflix on your desktops or your laptops or you look at Hulu on your mobile phone. And then when we say CTV, we mean a connected television effects. So the actual device is still the TV, but the content that's being delivered is based off of an Internet connection. So I'm streaming as opposed to I have a set-top box where that content is coming from my cable or satellite subscriber. Makes sense?

Perfect. Thank you, sir.

All right. Great. So when we think about that type of share of ours, I mean this really correlates to the growth that we're seeing on CTV. But we've definitely hit this tipping point. We're now consistently, month after month, the amount of the shared hours that are being delivered and watched from digital and CTV is higher than that of linear. That is not to say that the content is being watched is not in itself live or maybe linear in nature. Many cable and satellite providers do have streaming versions of their content. So this is less about what content is being produced and more about where the content is being consumed. But if we look at something like CTV, when I say CTV, that's connected TV, that growth has definitely continued on these devices. Looking again, a couple of years back, 4 years back, there was roughly about 60 million, 65 million households that were doing this. Now we're up to nearly 90 million -- about 90 million. And if we look at overall, that's a 42% increase in the last 4 years. It's only down at about 5% for the last year because so many households have decided that they want to do this type of content consumption. But from the hours perspective, that growth is still going strong in double digits. I mean it's 130% from 2019, but it's up 21% from just a year ago. We're looking year-over-year in May. So the trajectory is definitely there. But we're going to take a closer look at CTV and specifically how these households or how households are consuming this content. Overall, 81%, if you -- there's a household that has a WiFi connection, we're looking at 81% penetration. They're doing some kind of streaming on a connected television. But overall, if we look at the entire U.S. population, and that includes whether you have a WiFi or not, that's still 73% of the home. So 7 out of 10, we're almost getting to 3 out of 4 homes are viewing some kind of streaming, and that's 238 million people within the market. All of these figures are up even compared to just a year ago. So that trajectory is still continuing. But those homes, we can break down into what they're actually looking at. 90 million homes, that's up from 4.5 million viewing some kind of content, that's 11 billion hours in just 1 month of consumption, and this is looking at May of this year. But compared to last year, that's still a 2 billion hour increase over the household. And then the number of average viewing days per household. So how many days during the month is streaming occurring on the TV, that's up to 22.3. So, roughly almost a day more than it was last year. We're spending a lot of time doing this streaming. And this is likely something that we expect to go up even higher as streaming continues to be the mode of choice for content consumption when it comes to a lot of the video we consume. But overall, how our users, our consumers doing this type of streaming on CTV, yes, there are all types of devices that can be here, but these are really the main ones that are pulling weights or more than their weight actually. And smart TV is the dominant device. Smart TVs are in roughly 75 million homes of the 90 million that are doing this type of streaming. So a very high penetration there. But streaming sticks and boxes, and gaming consoles are there too. Overall, if we look at the trajectory of smart TVs, though, that has been a very positive one to where smart TVs used to not have all the functionality or all the apps that may have been desired by consumers, but many of them are going to have -- many of the OEMs have really taken strides to be able to do that and have offer whether they are homegrown or whether they are really leveraging what are available in the market, that has really allowed us to, as a consumer base, consolidate the number of devices that we potentially have and do more of the streaming that we want to do directly from a television set itself rather than using the box. But overall, there is still a lot of usage from all of these types of devices. When we think about the types of devices though, what we're actually streaming, it can vary. But the number of services that we are streaming has still increased over time. If we look in 2019, so 4 years ago, on average, a household was looking at four different services. They have 4 different services that they were streaming. 2 years ago that went to 5. And this year, it went to 6. So over time, these are indications that more streaming is occurring, but the question that we always pose at comScore is what is driving that. And when we looked into it, it was really new services that were outside of what we would call the top 6 services. When we think about how that growth is really manifesting itself, it's in the hours. When we think about the topics which for clarity are Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+ and HBO Max/MAX now. But where there -- where the growth that we're seeing, particularly in the hours, the hours -- remember, I said that there was a 2 billion increase in hours, where is that coming from? That's coming from outside of the top 6. So these are platforms that are being introduced like -- and we'll talk later about free ad-supported support streaming television apps. There are applications like Pluto, like Tubi. And then there are also indications that if you recall the downward trajectory that we might have seen in traditional cable subscribers, that is not to say that cable subscribers aren't streaming. Applications that really lend themselves to presenting live linear content in the streaming environment like, for example, Spectrum, those have really shown a robustness and an ability to garner a lot of streaming hours. Overall, 75% of the video hours that were grown between last year and this year, those are coming from outside of the top 6. So a lot of that new content is coming from these particular services that we definitely use, but in the past, may not have known about as much, but they may not exist. But for a moment, I do want to focus on the top 6 because they are still very dominant. They have a huge portion of the pie, as you saw earlier. So they're not there. When we think about the top 6 services, these are all streamed and at least 1 in every 3 households. They have a reach greater than 1/3. But overall, Netflix, the top of -- at the top the heap. Nearly 75% of households that have CTV are doing some form of Netflix streaming, YouTube, Amazon, Hulu, HBO Max, which very recently transformed and rebranded itself into MAX, and Disney+. Overall, the number of hours watched, that varies greatly. And some of that is related to what content is available and then YouTube and Hulu, they do have components of them that lend themselves to live streaming as well as linear. And then you have very heavily surging or binge-worthy highly popular shows that are on some of these other services that leverage themselves to getting large audiences to watch that particular content. But overall, these are the big 6 services. And they maintained their large reach and their high streaming hour status. But over the course of the last couple of years as particularly the economics of streaming has changed both for the services themselves and us on the consumer side, we've observed that there are -- there's less of the ability for many households and less of the desire to have multiple streaming services. And does your household have all of these or just a select few? And if you did have all of these, are you still subscribing? Or have you trimmed it down and you're being more selective over time? So look at this, what we did was at comScore, we took the subscriber base of Netflix. And we want to look and see if you're a new subscriber to one of these services -- one of these other services in the top 6. What's the likelihood that's you're also subscribing to Netflix, you're a new subscriber to Netflix? And you are prescribing to both of these things at the same time? And what we have observed is that over time, in the last year, fewer Netflix subscribers are also signing up for these top services. What I mean by that is that a year ago, if someone were signing up for Prime Video, they're signing up for Amazon. 93% of those new subscribers at Amazon were also going to be subscribing to Netflix, down to 60% of your new subscriber to Amazon this year, only a 60% likelihood that you're also going to be subscribing to Netflix. And overall, if we bundle all of the top 6 together, and we look at Netflix plus other, it was roughly 90% probability of being able to do multiple services. And today, it's more of like a 55%. So there's a lot of consolidation in how the business is working and what consumers are choosing to do when they're trying to make multiple selections.

James, I have a couple of quick questions here. We talked a little bit about YouTube. Can you just clarify for everyone, is that talking YouTube, the app? YouTube TV? Under what circumstances should we be thinking in interpreting that?

Sure. So YouTube in this context is what we would consider YouTube.com, so the main YouTube application as well as its linear corollary YouTube TV. So it's the combination of YouTube as a whole there. And a similar thing with Hulu.

Perfect. I think we've got time for a quick poll question just for everyone that's on the webinar. It's the team behind the scenes that makes the magic happen. All they do. Look at that. Right on time. Would love while I ask James 1 or 2 more quick questions, if you would take the moment. What would be more interesting or beneficial for your business needs: streaming services as a consolidation, the expansion of, or selectivity. You'll just click one of those and let us know, that would be great. And whilst that is done, I'm going to ask James one of the other quick questions that came up was on the previous slide, we were talking about the numbers of CTV service streaming percentages and those indexes. Is that hours per month per the household? I just want to make sure I understood that correctly.

Yes. That was hours per month. So, like for example, Netflix was at 35 -- 35 hours per month on the average household is streaming some form of Netflix. And that can, of course, vary based off of the size of the household. If you have a household that has 5 people, and you have a Netflix subscription, those 5 people may all watch the same thing, but they may watch something different. And all those things are accumulating ultimately to present the data that we're having.

Perfect. Thank you, James. Okay, we've got the results of the poll, let's slide it up real fast, and then we'll shift topics here for a second. But appreciate everyone that was able to -- okay, here we go, was able to put in their results. Let's see, number -- oh, it's a tie, okay? So we've got almost a split here of streaming service consolidation versus selectivity. Very interesting, just given some of the data, James, that you were even talking about because this clearly is a diversification happening amongst the consumer audiences out there across the land right now as people are -- it's almost interesting to me, taking myself outside of my role here and thinking just about my own consumption and trying to think about what things I'm consuming, what series or shows and things, what types of content. And how that has even shifted over the past 6 months or so. So this is quite interesting. Anything in here surprising in the numbers, James?

I would say probably, probably no. Because I think the overarching trend, and keeping in mind the landscape, it really is lending itself to the idea of there was an explosion of options that occurred. And when those options were particularly non-ad-supported options, you've to pay for each one, it became definitely a decision point for many households that they needed to understand and acknowledge what is most meaningful to them and what can they keep versus what could they live without, or what could they live only temporarily with, put it on pause and then come back when particular content was, was there. So I think this -- particularly the time of the poll of the general consolidation versus I'm going to subscribe, cancel or pause, and then come back, and then do this throughout the year based on whatever the content is, is interesting, but probably something that we're all experiencing.

Well, I'll tell you some of the questions I'm seeing coming in are around the very next section of our webinar, the supported -- ad-supported streaming section. So I will let you dive right into that since that's so timely to the questions that folks are looking at.

Sure thing. So as I talked about all this, there is the idea of what is next. And really, the age of ad-supported streaming is where I want to concentrate a lot of time because when we talk -- when I talked about how there are more services, how are we getting more services if we're also consolidating. And the answer to that is it is largely that there are more services that we're trying as consumers, but they are ad-supported, so they are either less expensive in general or entirely free for us. Overall, to dive into this idea, the ad-supported. Consumers in the U.S., they're adopting ad-supported streaming services at a faster rate. So -- and this is an acceleration over the last couple of years. If we look at the households that are doing some kind of streaming with a non-ad supported service, of course, with the households that are doing sometimes streaming like an ad-supported service, that has really, from a trajectory perspective, accelerating and taken off. The number of ad-supported households and then household that are doing ad-supported streaming is roughly 84 million, and that's out of the 90 million that are out there. So almost every household is doing some kind of ad-supported streaming. And that has eclipsed the non-ad-supported households. So know that these are offerings that are being used out there. And the fact that some of the largest streaming services like a Netflix, like a Disney+ Plus or a MAX, have really decided in the last year, 2 years, to take their non-ad-supported streaming services and offer and support tiers of those is something that is really accelerated this growth. And I wanted to briefly talk about that type of consumer response to ad-supported tier availability. At comScore, we have a large -- we've a large group of households that we are able to ask these questions to around whether -- given the service that you have, do you have the ad-supported version or not? And when we told members of our home panel about the services that they had and which tiers they have, this is where we netted out in this most recent way. And Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, these are your traditional non ad-supported services that they started as non-ad-supported, they eventually transitioned to having ad-supported, but they are still largely non-ad-supported. People are still largely paying subscription fees in order to not to see ads on these, even though there are subscribers that are keeping these services or signing on these services for the first time because they can get them ads potentially lower prices and have ads with them. If we look at the other side of the graph on the right side, where we have largely ad-supported ones, services that started as ad supported and do offer non-ad-supported tiers, but the primary mode of consumption was initially going to be either free or ad-supported and then YouTube, Twitch, Peacock, Discovery+, these are all services that really are offering these things. And then they're sort of middle ground of some of these as well. But overall, it's interesting how the subscription -- sorry, SVOD, subscription on-demand services. But -- sorry, they're first, are continuing to be there and the ones that started as advertising first are continuing to be there. Even though there is crossover, and in any of these, I could have as a consumer, either ads or no ads. When we look at that as how advertisers though, can really take advantage of some of these expansions of ad supported, one thing that we definitely want to note when we look at data here at comScore is not just reach or total hours, but intensity, how consistent is a consumer, a household actually using the service. And really advertisers can take advantage of this because they can capture consistent, highly engaged audiences, when we look at hours per household, even if the hours of the household for a particular service may be lower than others. And we wanted to look at that. When we look at hours per household, so this is, again, intensity. It's how many hours in there, in the month, is the household streaming. At the top of the list is not one of the top 6 streaming services, but rather an MVPD. So a cable subscriber. In this case is Charter's Spectrum TV. So these are households that have a Charter subscription or a cable, and they can watch that cable via Spectrum TV apps on streaming. And there is quite a bit of it during the month, indicating that really this is an opportunity and a usage of a consumption point of linear television content, but using streaming as the medium port. And overall 7, if we look at the hours per household, we ranked services based on hours for households, 7 of the top 10 are either ad-supported with live or linear streaming are Spectrum, YouTube, Hulu, Sling, Philo, Pluto, Xfinity. And the hours per viewing day, or even the number of hours per day are still very high for all -- given really, I think, credence the idea that while the overall landscape is shifting to streaming, there is this very strong place for the type of engagement, the type of consistency, the type of use of live and linear. And that extends beyond just the traditional cable or satellite subscribers. It goes to FAST channels as well. FAST, if you're unfamiliar with, is free, ad-supported streaming television. These are apps or services out there like The Roku Channel, Pluto, Tubi, Freevee, Xumo. These are really taking the model of being able to have a large number of channels that are available for via Internet connection, for free, anyone can sign up for them, and you can then watch what you want over the course of whatever is online. Very similar to how really television began in its infancy 50 years ago. But when we look at how FAST is changing over time, we told a number of researchers for this, and we looked at, if you were -- 15 months ago using one of these services versus are using 1 now. And overall, all of the services are really showing some significant growth, double-digit growth in their audiences over time. Specifically, if we look at some of the growth that The Roku Channel, Freevee and Tubi and Pluto has had, they're in roughly 20% this type of range of reach, which is getting -- inching up there compared to the top 6. So the share of hours are there. The audience is there. It's using free supported, and it is something that we're seeing, and we want to our eye on as far as how the consumer is using these services versus how the consumer is using other services. Taking advantage of this is -- by far a major player is the OEMs. If you recall, I talked about smart TVs and how they are dominant as far as the device being used for streaming. Well, these OEMs separately leverage integrated FAST channels and expanded their apps and compatibility to build on this type of extended ad-supported revenue model. And we look at that there are some brands like a Samsung, a Vizio, or an LG, that have created their homegrown version of FAST channels. There are Samsung TV Plus, LG Channels, Vizio WatchFree+, TCL, did just announce that they are going to have a similar version of this, a TCL plus. But all of these manufacturers of these smart TVs is have some kind of integration, whether it's from The Roku OS and the Fire OS from Amazon or thee Google OS from Android, being able to have a consolidation. So the user of the TV can turn it on and have this litany of content that they can then consume, whether it's available to them, or live, or available to them as this combination of pulling together a content from different apps, it's available to them. And that is going to make the brands for these OEMs powerful as far as being able to have, in addition to their own device business, an ad-supported business as well where they can have a steady stream of revenue from that. But part of FAST and why it's so interesting is that there is the idea that because of all of the ability to have so many different content types, we can start talking about targeted content. And when we think about targeted content, it's really about trying to identify specific content that is resonating with a particular audience. We thought this was interesting, so we wanted to dive in more. We looked at FAST and AVOD services that provide these opportunities, but from the lens of a particular type of consumer. In this case, we chose Hispanics households. So households with Hispanics in them. And if we look at overall, the ad-supported first types of services, Netflix, Amazon, MAX, Disney, they have overall, in last year, declined as far as the number of hours per household. So again, the intensity. But if we look on the converse of the ad-supported side, particularly the SaaS services like Pluto and Tubi, those have shown increases in the case of the FAST channel, massive increases for this particular audience. And it's interesting because the programming on the services are both targeted in nature for their channels that may be specifically speaking to Hispanics on some of these services, and that's true different audiences as well, I'll talk about one in the next slide. But overall, the fact that content availability can be more targeted and is free is something that is going to be able to present the opportunity for advertisers and content producers to be able to pair advertising with content. And that's something that we've also seen when we looked at the Black African-American community, which we also decided that we wanted to understand how those FAST channels were evolving over time, and how targeted channels or in the case of Tubi, for example, targeted originals that were only available there. But we're speaking to these particular audiences really helps drive some of the growth that we've seen. Overall, Tubi, have an average of 25% of the Black African-American audience coming to consume content on it. And that's been an increase going from 21% to 28% in the last 15 months. So that type of growth really is, is a lot of ways fueled by the availability of the conference. And on the flip side, from the advertising perspective being able to have content that you compare your particular ads with. But we did want to acknowledge, though, that there's certainly the idea that there are many different targeted audiences and many different audiences that could be looked at from this perspective. So we went through each of the services and pick up -- what are some of the top things indexing audiences just compared on average over the last 18 months. So in some cases, those are for Freevee, Black African-American, The Roku Channel, it's the LGBTQ+ community. But you can look at this from the perspective of both the mass services themselves and the MVPD. So these are the linear subscriber base that can stream as well. The Roku TV being 94% more likely to have a Cuban audience than a standard audience number would be. But these are interesting tidbits that I think can really produce a box for a lot of advertisers that want to be able to bring their content to a particular audience. Overall, ad-supported is big, but there are a lot of things that we have observed here at comScore, and I wanted to take the last several minutes to talk about some of these emerging trends. And then bringing all together, just talk about how we take that beyond media planning. First of all, CTV is not just big in the U.S., it's big everywhere, and it's growing everywhere. Overall, CTV usage is expanding globally, depending on which market you're looking at, it can be anywhere from a single digit, but all the way up to huge double-digit. Indonesia, saw a 48% -- or India, sorry, saw a 48% increase of CTV usage in the last year. Overall, on average, about 16% year-over-year was what that type of growth in non-U.S. markets. And that's true of the overall usage, but also true if we look at specific players within that market. Taking YouTube as the example, they've increased their global CTV engagement. And this really demonstrates the number of minutes growth that YouTube is being able to garner. On average, about 22% increase outside the U.S. of YouTube on CTV devices over the course of the last year. And this is true across the board, every one of the markets that they're in, they're really showing some increases. India, there as I was pointing out before and how it showed that large increase overall of CTV. YouTube alone from its minutes perspective, it was roughly a [ 50% ] increase year-over-year. So those are certainly one emerging trend that CTV is not just U.S., CTV is global in nature. Another trend that I want to talk about here is short form. We talked a lot about the streaming services that are out there, the Netflix, and the Hulus, and there's a lot of long-form video content. But short form, which is strongly associated with social when we think about Instagram, TikTok, even YouTube for its Shorts, those have seen surges as well. So we are still -- we're doing short-form video just as voraciously as we are with long-form video. Reels has seen as far as just a number of actions that are taken from it and then whether I -- or whether I watched it, posted about it, liked and shared it, 56% increase compared to the first half of '21 to the first half of 2023. So those are some interesting tidbit that we don't want to forget about, the social is driving a lot of the video content that is out there. It is a large component of short-form video. And even though it is not as probably front of mind all the time when it comes to the wake of the large or the dominant top 6, these services are there too are offering something that is valuable. The other thing that I want to talk about was audio. There are things outside of video that we also stream. And if we think about how often we're streaming from the perspective of just audio, whether it's from a smart speaker, for example, 41 million homes out of the 90 million, that's up 31% from last year. This is going to a similar trajectory that we saw for video when it comes to audio. Thousands of hours are being sent from these hours for household for streaming audio. And this is, of course, again, something cumulatively everything within the household across streaming audio from the speakers. So asking it to do the weather versus asking it to play these recorded podcast for any number of hours. And overall, that's true on mobile as well. So 290 million hours, which is up 9% from last year. There's a lot streaming audio occurring. And specifically, one of the most prominent usage of streaming audio is podcasting. Podcast listeners, they are very engaging and particularly on these top audio applications, which have a large composite of their audience using them for podcasting, that is very true. So if we looked at the top, in say, the top 6 audio applications, Spotify, Pandora, iHeart, YouTube, Amazon and Apple. Of the 76 million podcast listeners out there that regularly are listening weekly, roughly about 1/3 of them are for each of these services doing that listening on those services, which is from the perspective of using those services, a higher index. So more likely for a podcast listener to use more one of these services than an average [indiscernible]. What they are listening to, though, varies greatly, but there are a lot of genres that really spans the gambit for what you could listen to a podcast about. But some of the top ones that we have observed when we've asked about what you are listening to comedy to do comedy -- lots of comedy, lots of sports, sport types of podcast and then advice and self-help. So getting those types of views of how can I better myself or how can I can improve myself. But overall, audio streaming, again, a growth factor for us and podcast, in particular, a medium or a type of content on audio streaming that is of great interest to a lot. Finally, before I shift away to what's beyond media planning, I want to talk about games. Games, they're fun. And connected gaming has really seen this continual growth similar to what we've seen in audio and video. So connected gaming console use, that's grown to be active, roughly 2 out of every 3 days in the households that happen. So 20 active days. You have a gaming console. You're probably using it every 2 or 3 days. And if we look at the brands overall, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or PlayStation Xbox, and usually the Switch, that has been also a growth trajectory for each of those brands with Nintendo probably benefiting the most in the last few years with the introduction of its Switch. When we look at gaming, though and what's -- what has been done within that space, within that community, there are components of gaming that are live in nature and then there's also the concept of eSports. We took a look at the top gaming site audiences just to see how well each of them were doing as far as attracting these types of people that either watch the video game live stream, played one or they watch these eSports actually themselves play eSports. Twitch was at the top of most of these lists not unsurprisingly, but Roblox and Microsoft and IGN also very highly indexing. And for anyone that's unfamiliar, indexing is really about being able to determine from the perspective of for this service, for this audience, what's the likelihood that, that someone interested in doing that action is using this service. So a higher number, anything about 100 is better than average. And the higher number, the more likely you are to find that audience doing that action on that entity. So Twitch is doing very well in that regard. But I recognize that we've only got about 3 minutes left, but I wanted to take some time for Q&A at the end, which means we're going to talk more about that, but first, media planning. And let's talk about that. We've talked a lot about what is going on with the landscape. But media planning is really a lot of the usage of the data that I talked about. I mean is the precursor to launching campaigns. But when campaigns are in flight, and eventually when they end, where the campaign run can be critical to reaching the intended audience. So different streams really provide incremental reach and they can constructively build on each other. What we did at comScore is we looked at some average -- some of the advertising campaigns that we've been able to investigate over time this year and looked at after a campaign have been running. What was the incremental reach? So how many people did you get on day 8 that weren't there on day 7? On day 9 that weren't there on day 8? And overall, CTV and digital, digital mean desktop and mobile, those are really particularly at the beginning parts of the campaign, so that 2 to 3-week mark, really getting a lot of incremental reach. You have the ability to get to a lot of people very quickly. Over time, though, that's going to wane because the more people that you reach, the more people that you have reached, and the fewer people that you have not. And when you look at TV versus digital versus CTV, they all kind of actually even out over the course of time than they're all sort of equally bringing in similar incremental audiences. But that is from an aggregate view. If we wanted them, if we're a campaign manager and want to understand what was my optimal platform mix, there's a lot more to consider because we have to consider who the audience is and where they're consuming their content. And if we look at -- to understand this better, we've done studies. So comScore has done studies, focusing on different top-of-the-funnel metrics. So we looked at aided awareness in this case. So after a camping ran, we wanted to understand, did that campaign, do anything? And if it did, where would that campaign being run? And what we have heard is the more touch points that we have, that is better. So if a campaign was only on TV versus TV and digital versus TV, digital, and CTV, the awareness was going to increase. But if we look at specific audience, let's say, Gen Z, that awareness was significantly increasing when you start adding in digital platforms. Maybe not unsurprising, but depending on the target of the audience, this is something that advertisers definitely always need to pay attention to. What else they also need to pay attention to is definitely the idea that certain audiences are exclusively going to be reached from a streaming perspective as opposed to a linear one. Specifically, we looked at a particular campaign that was running from a major QSR. And we looked at how that campaign was running on both linear TV or traditional live linear TV. But then what would happen if you added YouTube to that. Overall, there were around 64 million people that have been reached by that linear components of a campaign and this is 18 to 49. So when adding in YouTube, there were 78 million, and of that 78 million, 35 million were only on YouTube. So that is a unique audience that allowed this campaign to instead of reaching 64 million, they were reaching 97 million to 98 million though, because they chose to, in addition to having linear, also ad-streaming. So this idea about cross-platform and how it can build on each other is something that advertisers, publishers, they know and they want to be able to ensure that they are reaching their optimal audience, but they're taking advantage of what that optimal mix is. And in doing so, that is generally also some type of optimization when it comes to targeting or activation. So as advertisers try to optimize their campaigns while still keeping within their budget, there are methods to creating that right mix and getting that maximum reach economically. One of those is being able to have the usage of grid targeting materials. We obviously have that. And what we wanted to do was to demonstrate that. So we did do a case study earlier where we took some of the targeting that was available to us for particular users and we segmented that based on the idea of the segment being cord-cutters. We want to -- the advertiser wanted to reach cord-cutters, but they want to do it more efficiently. And before using this particular segment versus after, there was a 66% drop in the CPA, which is the metric for being able to understand how an expensive the customer acquisition is. So overall, the ability to find optimal mixes and utilizing those with your targeting is generally going to produce high performance. So we've covered a lot today. But just a couple of key takeaways and then I wanted to make sure they had a little bit of time for questions. The first takeaway, of course, is that streaming growth has moved beyond just the top services. I talked about this at the very beginning. The top 6 are the top 6. They have huge reach. They have huge amount of hours. But if we're looking at where hours coming from as far as it grows, that's not coming from the top 6. It's coming from the ad-supported services like the FAST channels is kind of some of the smaller services that are coming on to the seat. But ad-supported really is where the search is happening. And that is through the expanded offerings that OEMs are doing by having their own homegrown version or by utilizing specific FAST services. This is going to be a major growth path that we expect. And then on streaming for brands, this is really about being able to find economic hallways to reach your audience, but optimizing your outcomes. You want to be able to have your audience, show them your great products, have them buy those great products, and then have this entire cycle go back. So ultimately, those are my key takeaways. I want to say thank you very much for everyone that has attended today. And I'm interested to hear if there are any questions.

Are there questions? Although there are plenty of them.

I know. I know.

Yes, some of these together a little bit. A quick one was, are we measuring attention in addition to awareness coming off of 1 of the 2 or 3 slides back where you were talking about that aided awareness?

Yes. So yes. So I talked about some of the top-of-the-funnel metrics. So aided awareness is one of them, but we are measuring other aspects of that, whether you did see the ad as well, whether you pay attention to it. Also, if you were plan to take an action from it and if you then take an action from it.

Perfect. There is a poll that's going to be coming in from the team here just to get feedback from you guys whilst we ask James a few more questions. So I would love it. It would mean a lot to us if you would take just a couple of seconds to pop those answers in. James, the other big commonality in questions was can we measure CTV at a person level? I know I've seen a lot of household level conversations. And so I just wanted to get your take on that.

Sure. So the short answer is yes. The measurement at a personal level is definitely something that, that comScore does and is capable of doing. The key driver of going from households to persons is the idea of co-viewing. I'm sitting in front of my television set that how that is streaming, of course, but that could be just me or there could be four other of my best friends that are there. And being able to do that conversion is something that we have within our products, and we do present within our reporting.

And then maybe time for 1 or 2 more. So early on, you talked about linear streaming, its growth trajectory. But I guess the question comes back as if linear is losing ground on the share of hours, how do we -- how should I be thinking about reconciling those two different trends?

Sure. This is a great question. And I think the reconciliation probably goes back to that one slide that I had about intensity, and how the top services as far as hours per household, how 7 out of the 10 of them are doing some kind of live or linear streaming. The top of that list was Spectrum, but Philo is also on it, Xfinity was on it. So the reconciliation really is thinking about the fact that while linear as a traditional offering, as in through a set-top box, that share of wallet was going down, but I can still consume linear content on other devices. So I can have connected linear content effectively. So the idea that live linear is going down is if reconciled by the fact that live linear on streaming is still garnering a lot of attention. And in the case of some of these companies, it is the largest component of their intensity as far as hours per households.

I'm going to squeeze in one more, and then I promise -- how are consumers adding more services, right? You talked about more services, more devices in the home. Pricing is also increasing around those subscriptions. So how are they -- how are consumers adding in these more services there?

Yes. So they -- and it's really the crux -- the crux of the whole ad-supported component. That's how consumers are adding in more services. FAST is free by nature. So I can have -- I can add-in a Pluto subscription or Tubi view. And that is not costing me any, any more. It is presenting to me advertisement, but that's really how I can add more services. So I can consume more content without paying more dollars directly.

Excellent. I'm going to try to group a lot of questions together. I've thrown them at you, James. You've handled them incredibly. I mean, you're like the expert on all the stuff. So I feel like it's just going to keep grabbing for me. For everyone else's questions that we did not get to, I want to be respectful of your time. Members of our team, including James and I will follow up with you one-to-one, make sure that we get you those answers. So please don't think if I didn't get it asked in this one that it's not going to or we will follow up with you. Just to reiterate, copy of the webinar recording, and that will go out to you in the next day or so, and then we'll answer all of those remaining questions out there. And James, I hate to tell you, but there's a good amount of them, and there are some phenomenal ones.

Well, go to.

Thank you, James. Thank you so much. I love everything about the incrementality, co-viewing diversification. I mean, there's so many important things out there right now. But most importantly, thank you to all of you who have taken the last hour out of your day to, to spend it with us. It means a lot to us. So wishing you the best as we wrap up this webinar, but thank you so much and look forward to seeing you on the next one.