With summer in full swing and millions of consumers heading off to their favorite vacation spot, watching your favorite TV shows is one routine that can now travel with you. That is if you are taking advantage of the TV Everywhere services that many popular networks and cable providers offer.
TV Everywhere, for the uninitiated, is the ability to watch television on a web-connected device like a smartphone or a tablet outside of the home. No more being tied to the living room couch in order to watch your favorite TV show. Best of all, TV Everywhere is a complementary service as part of your cable subscription.
The number of networks and providers offering TV Everywhere apps is constantly growing (full list here). HBO – with HBOGo and HBO Now – may be the most prominent but the dozens of others include a wide range of news, sports, movies and lifestyle networks. Apps like these – and those offered by cable providers like Cox’s Countour – are becoming increasingly popular and have been downloaded millions of times.
It seems obvious now, but barely five years ago, a true TV Everywhere experience was hard to imagine. After all, the first iPad wasn’t released until April of 2010 when the iPhone was barely three years old. The growth of TV Everywhere has gone hand-in-hand with the increasing ubiquity of handheld digital devices capable of streaming video. Now that practically everyone is walking around with a highly capable computer with an incredible HD screen built right in, taking TV with us everywhere just makes sense.
While it’s certainly convenient to catch up on your favorite shows while at the park or on a long car ride, TV Everywhere technology shines brightest when it’s time to watch sports – because as much as we’d all like, we can’t be at home for every pitch, every putt, or every down. Thanks to TV Everywhere apps like WatchESPN and Fox Sports Mobile, we’re able to catch it all. For example, the College Football Playoff National Championship back in January attracted 1.2 million unique viewers on WatchESPN alone – a 128 percent increase over the 2014 game.
TV Everywhere has made it so that watching TV doesn’t have to be an appointment-based in-home experience. It’s created something that works for everyone – for each of our individual schedules and preferences. And while there’s nothing better than flopping on the couch with a big bowl of popcorn and gearing up for the first-run release of a favorite show, it’s nice to know that if you miss it, that show will be waiting for you on your tablet the next morning.