Rentrak: Hurricane Irene drove spike in VoD usage

TV viewers flooded cable video-on-demand (VoD) platforms during Hurricane Irene, VoD measurement firm Rentrak (Nasdaq: RENT) said Friday.

Cable operators with systems in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic saw a 10 percent increase in transactions for VoD movies last weekend, Rentrak said, citing data from the OnDemand Essentials measurement service it markets to pay TV distributors and content suppliers.

While the cable operators in areas that didn't lose power during the hurricane saw a boost in VoD revenue, the storm hurt movie theater owners. Ticket sales at movie theaters dropped 18.9 percent due to the storm, Rentrak said, citing data from its Box Office Essentials product.

Irene also drove an increase in rentals for DVDs and Blu-ray discs as it approached. Coastal states north of Virginia saw a spike in rentals of physical media, with increases in rentals ranging from 30 percent to as high as 300 percent, Rentrak said. Not surprisingly, fewer consumers visited local movie rental outlets once the storm hit last weekend, with disc rentals dropping to levels 20 to 40 percent lower than the weekend of Aug. 19-21, Rentrak said.

The data Rentrak released Friday shows it has the potential to measure how viewers consume content on multiple screens. Cable operators and program suppliers are turning to ad-supported VoD to boost revenue, and can use Rentrak data to show advertisers how much time viewers spend watching on-demand content from major cable and broadcast networks.

But Rentrak and its cable partners still aren't sharing data on how much traffic they see on free on-demand platforms. It will be difficult to draw media buyers to ad-supported VoD until the industry releases detailed usage reports comparable to Nielsen's measurement of live TV programming.

For more:
- see news release

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