Paid Streaming Services Ready for Prime Time

According to a new Nielsen report, about one-third of U.S. consumers streamed long-form video content, such as a TV show or a movie, from the web through a paid subscription service, at the end of 2011. Nielsen also dove into researching who is watching content through the two dominant web streaming subscription services, Hulu Plus and Netflix. In terms of age, 31% of Hulu users are between the ages of 18 and 34 and more than a third are over the age of 50; 40% of Netflix users are in the 18 to 34 age demographic with only 17% over 50. In terms of, 57% of Netflix’s audience and 59% of Hulu’s audience is female. Women also account for 64% of total time spent watching content on Hulu and Netflix. Nielsen tags the gender data as something of interest; in its recent Cross-Platform Report, Nielsen had found that women stream less online video overall than men. And in terms of race, three-fourths of both the Hulu and Netflix audience is white, while more Hispanics are using Netflix (16%) than Hulu (11%).