ACMA Find Double Catch-Up Viewing Figures In Australia

Users of online TV in Australia have doubled in the past year according to the country’s official media body ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority), with online streaming of TV-based content being used at its highest-ever rates.

The ACMA report, entitled ‘ACMA Communications Report 2010-11‘, claims that for June 2011, around 1.1 million unique users viewed TV content via an official catch-up service, up from the the figure of 568,000 recorded in June 2010.

The explanation for this near-doubled figure is that along with an increasing popularity of online TV services, Australian Internet service providers (ISP’s) now offer higher-speed and improved services with larger data usage allowances, potentially encouraging potential online viewers now that they have the proper means to do so.

National public broadcaster ABC’s Georgina Waite had claimed last month that the ABC iView (an Australian service with a number of similarities to the BBC iPlayer) was experiencing strong growth, with the channel’s comedy series Angry Boys getting 1.4m hits during the time it was on, with the iView website itself on a total of 1.6 million.

Meanwhile, commercial service Multi Channel Network recently announced that providers Foxtel and Austar would be coming together to launch a multi-platform catch-up TV service (free to subscribers) of their own in 2012, in a bid to rival the free-to-air iView in the online market.

Online TV, as well as social networking, are thought by ACMA to be the two main contributions to an increase of 76% in the amount of downloaded data in Australia, at a total of 274TB downloaded across the nation during the Q2 2011 measurement period, at an average rate of 25.1GB per Internet user during that time.

ACMA said that the destinations of these downloads was slowly seeing a growth of mobile services, stating: ”While mobile Internet use is increasing, fixed-line networks continue to do the heavy lifting of the digital economy, carrying an estimated 93% of total data downloaded via the Internet.”

With online services and viewing options certainly on the rise in Australia (like much of the rest of the world), will the huge rate of increase continue into 2012?

Crazy Matt Cazzy into all things hi-tech, gizmos and gadgets. If its just out, i want it. Loves watching tv on every device ever invented that can handle it

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