New figures show UK viewers to be watching more television than they were ten years ago, but on far more devices.
Thinkbox says the average UK viewer watched a total of 3 hours, 51 minutes of TV a day in 2015, 1% less than 2014, 5% more than 10 years ago. The average viewer is spending four minutes a day watching TV on devices such as tablets and smartphones.
16-24s watched an average of 2 hours, 24 minutes a day of TV in 2015, which breaks down as 2 hours, 14 minutes a day watched on a TV set and 10 minutes watched on other devices. This is 7% less than in 2014, 8% less than 2005. However, TV remains by far the most popular form of video for this age group.
They watched over twice as much Broadcaster VOD than the average (7% vs. 3%), twice as much YouTube (10.3% vs. 4.4%) and twice as much SVOD (8.7% vs. 4%).
Lindsey Clay, Thinkbox CEO: “These new figures show that TV dominates the video world for all age groups. Today’s young people watch on-demand forms of video more than the generations before that didn’t grow up with them. This makes sense as they do not tend to have control of the TV set and so turn to their personal screens to watch what they want.”
Subscription video on demand services that include Netflix and Amazon Prime now take 4% of the viewing pie, up from 2.3% in 2014. The most likely explanation here is the services are taking share from the DVD market.
YouTube alone accounts for 4.4% of video viewing.
Online ‘adult’ video also accounts for 4.4% of total video, down from 4.6% in 2014.
The detailed stats gathered by Thinkbox have benefitted from changes in the way the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB) now collates TV data, including with streaming data from the UK Broadcasters for TV viewing on other devices.
