More people are bringing streaming services to the living room

While the rise of standalone streaming services has been fueled, in part, by increased connection speeds combined with the ubiquity of smart mobile devices, video consumption is still often taking place in the living room. And in the case of Hulu’s over-the-top streaming video service, living room viewing is actually on the rise. Today, living room viewing accounts for over 58 percent of Hulu’s content streams, the company reports, up from 44 percent back in the first quarter of 2014. The rise has been fairly rapid – by the third quarter of last year, watching Hulu via living room devices was already at 50 percent. The trend is not limited to Hulu, either. In a recent industry report from Freewheel, the firm noted that video viewing via over-the-top streaming devices is up 380 percent year-over-year, while viewing over smartphones is up 105 percent.