According to recent reports from Oregon-based video-on-demand researcher Rentrak and Port Washington, New York’s The NPD Group, US VOD users consume more multimedia content, have higher household incomes and are more likely to have children in the house than the general population.

In fact, contends Rentrack research group project manager Jarvis Schuckman, ‘Kids are the ultimate on-demand consumers. They want to watch what they want and time isn’t an issue for them.’ As such, he says children’s content is among the top-three types of programming selected by consumers who have access to VOD services in the US.

In an effort to bring more awareness to advertisers and agencies regarding the growing value of the VOD platform and its consumers, Rentrak and NPD have provided a holistic view of their behavior in the VOD Consumer Profiles report for 2010. (Rentrak has also released its State of VOD Trend Report 2009, which covers VOD behavior from 2007 to 2009.) In combining Rentrak’s VOD data with NPD’s market findings on overall consumer behavior, the reports blend findings from behavioral, usage and consumer profile data to learn how VOD users watch movies and if users purchases more or fewer movies across different formats.

‘We’ve found that free content is the most popular on-demand content out there, and kids content makes up about 25% of all free on-demand orders,’ says Schukman, whose team accessed data from 99% of US cable companies offering VOD. And an average of 11 programs are ordered via each VOD-enabled set-top-box in the US every month, which adds up to more than 104 million kids content orders per month. ‘Kids content is typically one of the top-growing forms of on-demand content that we are seeing,’ explains Schuckman. ‘Each year it continues to grow and become more popular.’