Audience dynamics of online catch up TV.

This paper studies the demand for TV contents on online catch up platforms, in order to assess how catch up TV offers transform TV consumption. We build upon empirical data on French TV consumption in June 2011: a daily monitoring of online audience on web catch up platforms, and live audience ratings of traditional broadcast TV. We provide three main results: 1) online consumption is more concentrated than off-line audience, contradicting the hypothesis of a long tail effect of catch up TV; 2) the temporality of replay TV consumption on the web is very close to the live broadcasting of the programs, thus softening rather than breaking the synchrony of traditional TV; 3) detailed data on online consumption of news reveals two patterns of consumption ("alternative TV ritual" vs. "à la carte").