In the UK, the BBC iPlayer recorded 226 million online requests in August 2015, 11% up on July and 24% higher than the same month of 2014, nearly all of this catch up viewing. Streaming from iPlayer tends to occur at the same times of day as linear and recorded viewing and its growth is at the expense of both those, generated in part by an emerging generation of viewers who are shunning both pay TV and DVR. The iPlayer’s user profile is strongly under 55 and much younger than the TV average, with many of its viewers combining the country’s Free To Air Freeview TV services with online generally, in some case topped up by a subscription VoD package such as Netflix or Amazon Prime.

There is also evidence of growth in VoD and catch up eating into traditional viewing in France, even if it is not clear whether DVR usage is being affected. French viewers watch on average 216 minutes of broadcast TV per day, 10 minutes less than a year ago, while pay TV operators’ VoD consumption grew about 20 percent to seven minutes per-person per-day.

Meanwhile in the US the long term growth in DVR viewing seems to be at least tailing off and is possibly running flat this year. The latest data comes from Nielsen’s Q2 2015 Total Audience Report, whose headline figure was another 4% year-on-year decline in linear viewing overall, down to 3 hours 49 minutes a day. But a key underlying point was that fast reducing growth in DVR viewing was failing to make up for a much bigger switch to OTT for on demand viewing.

Although DVR penetration surpassed 50% for the first time in the US, DVR viewing only rose by 3 minutes a week over the year. By contrast around 20 times that level, 63 minutes, had transferred from linear to online, nearly all of that on demand of some kind, whether sVOD or catch up.

Currently these trends vary significantly between countries, platforms and operators. Clearly satellite operators have been constrained by the lack of a return path via their medium so that they have had to rely either on the DVR or broadband, or a combination of path, to provide access to VoD or on-demand content. Sky for example has adopted several approaches in Europe for on demand and catch up, including peer to peer streaming over a fixed broadband Internet connection, over 3G cellular to smart phones, and a push VoD service over satellite to Sky+ DVRs, where the operator selects content for download on the basis of the subscriber’s past habits.

There is little chance of a major decline in DVR usage anytime soon because there will still be firm demand for recording favourite shows or movies to keep, while consumption of home based storage for user generated content is actually growing. Rising concerns over privacy are encouraging some users to prefer home based NAS (Network Attached Storage) to the cloud for a variety of personal media including home videos. Another factor is that many catch up services still have a limited window, often just seven days, which is not enough for many users.

But here again BBC iPlayer has been leading the way, having extended its window from seven to 30 days in October 2014. If this trend continues and a point is reached at which most commercial content is available indefinitely on demand at a click or two, demand for home DVR and even network DVR will wither away. At the same time growth in binge viewing is also driving on demand, even if here we are talking about a different form of packaging content rather than strictly catch up or time shifting.

What we are clearly going to see is a convergence in terms of access between legacy or historical archived content and recent or currently showing TV series, which will all be available over a common online platform such as iPlayer.