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Roku leading the way in streaming TV boxes, with fireTV, Chromecast & Apple TV following

New data from comScore shows that Roku leads the market in streaming TV boxes, with an 18% market share, giving it close to the combined totals of its closest rivals, Amazon’s fireTV and Google’s Chromecast. Apple TV completes the top four, with a 5% share …

comScore collected the data in December of last year.

The company notes that despite the growing use of video on demand services, live TV still dominates, accounting for 84% of all viewing against 14.9% time-shifted TV and just 1.1% video on demand. However, this is very much driven by demographics: Millennials and Gen X spend more time watching digital media than live TV.

In streaming services, Netflix is the unsurprising market leader at just under 40% penetration, followed by YouTube at around 27% and Amazon Video at a surprisingly high 17%. Hulu remains below 10%.

But TV is itself declining in importance as people use other devices to stream video content. Smartphone usage has doubled since 2013, with tablet usage also up 26%. This has been in part driven by the fact that nearly one in eight U.S. Internet users are now mobile-only, with 18-24yo women the key demographic here, at 22%.

On desktops, Google Chrome is the clear market leader at 51% of the desktop browser market, up from 48% across the six-month period. Edge saw some gains, up from 6% to 8%. Apple’s Safari retained its market share of 10% across the second half of last year, while Internet Explorer and Firefox saw their share fall.

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