ComScore Tracks Consumer Tech Interaction

ComScore today introduced comScore Connected Home, what it calls the first syndicated service to be based on the company’s proprietary Total Home Panel — a research platform that measures consumer behavior across home network-connected devices. Connected Home delivers insight into usage of products including computers, mobile phones, tablets, streaming sticks, smart TVs, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and more.

“There are more screens and other connected devices in homes than ever before, yet there have been major gaps in understanding how consumers interact with this technology,” said Dan Hess, EVP of products at comScore. “Whether our clients seek to understand new dynamics of media consumption such as over-the-top delivery, gaming and other entertainment options, or IoT adoption, this new service is a major step forward in enabling removing these blind spots.”

Connected Home provides detailed information on several product categories. While computing and media consumption devices are the most widely used in the home today, this new service also accounts for an array of new and emerging smart home devices. Below are examples of the most prevalent devices that Connected Home measures today:

• Computers: Desktop and laptop including Windows, Mac and other operating systems

• Mobile Devices: Smartphone and tablet including iOS and Android

• Gaming Consoles: Xbox, PlayStation, Wii

• Living Room Devices: Smart TVs, streaming boxes & sticks, and Blu-ray players

• Smart Home/IoT Devices — A/V systems, thermostats, home security, appliances and more

Subscribers to comScore Connected Home receive key measures including device penetration, usage frequency, engagement time, household demographics, OEM and OS market share and cross-device activity patterns to learn how these products are used in the home. Clients access these metrics through a web-based user interface with flexible reporting capabilities.

The foundation of Connected Home is comScore’sTotal Home Panel, a “true single-source research platform designed to measure the realities of cross-platform media consumption today,” the company said. Since beginning to scale the Total Home Panel in early 2016, comScore has grown it to measure activity across a nationally distributed sample of more than 12,500 households with more than 147,000 active devices per month and 62,000 active devices per day.

ComScore Connected Home is available now.

Among all media devices in U.S. connected homes, laptop and desktop computers had the highest penetration at 90%, followed closely by mobile phones at 88%. Media devices capable of delivering over-the-top media content, including streaming boxes and sticks (36%), gaming consoles (31%) and smart TVs (28%), also now feature prominently in the connected home.

 Apple owned the largest media device market share in January at 24.1%, due to its sizeable footprint in the computer (Mac), smartphone (iPhone), tablet (iPad) and streaming box (Apple TV) markets. Microsoft ranked a very close No. 2 at 22.2%, while Samsung (13%), Amazon (6.8%) and LG (4.1%) rounded out the top five.