Survey findings were announced at ITV Con -- an Internet TV and interactive TV technologies conference in San Jose, California.

Orb Networks VP, GM television Herve Utheza says, "As content providers race to ramp up their digital offerings, the audience continues to see the true future of television more in terms of additional programming choices than better quality."

-- People valued programming choices over TV image quality (74 per cent to 26 per cent)

-- Looking ahead, to a world where TV will soon be offered on a variety of screens from small, to mobile, to large, the percentage of respondents choosing programming choices jumps to 90 per cent against 10 per cent to image quality

-- Programming choice preferences were highest for news (87 per cent), comedy (83 per cent) and general TV shows (77 per cent)

-- TV image quality was cited as most important among movies (45 per cent) and sports events (31 per cent)

-- Movie audiences are pretty much evenly split between choice and quality

-- Sports is the only category where image quality is the clear winner, but 41 per cent of respondents also admit not being interested in sports.

Utheza adds, "People want their HD movies or sports on the big screen TV in their living rooms, but they also want to see YouTube videos, Johnny‘s baseball game, and their favorite Internet TV program on the big TV.

"The Holy Grail for the television industry is creating systems that harness this demand for ‘new media‘ by making it as simple and easy to consume on the TV screen, as today‘s TV content. This is where IP delivered TV truly unleashes the promise of tomorrow‘s television: a hybrid world of pay TV, personal and ‘over the top‘ content where the consumer makes the choice of what they want among branded and ‘long tail‘ programming."