The amount of so-called unidentified viewing grew by 3 percentage points in 2018 to 20% of all TV set activity, according to BARB’s annual exploration of the UK’s television viewing habits.
The audience researcher believes the growth from an average 41 to 48 minutes a day could be attributed to SVOD. Since the inclusion of an SVOD question in BARB’s establishment survey, in 2014, BARB has been able to plot the number of SVOD homes against the average quarterly levels of unidentified viewing. The result shows a strong correlation between the two.
Establishment Survey data also shows 12.3 million homes in the UK had at least one of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Now TV in Q4 2018 – a year-on-year increase of 20%. Netflix is the main driver of this increase, having added 2.2 million homes compared to Q4 2017. Amazon too has shown impressive growth, adding more than a million homes, while Now TV has added just under 100,000.
The number of homes with two or more services rise by 32% from 3.26 million to 4.3 million in the past year.
Households with three or more people, which are more than 2.5 times more likely to have children present, are 47% more likely to subscribe to one of the three main SVOD services than the UK average.
BARB also gives an insight into how the dropping of whole series on demand is changing viewer habits.
Drama Killing Eve premiered on BBC One on September 15, 2018. All the series episodes were immediately made available on the BBC iPlayer simultaneously.
An examination of data around episode 6 shows more than half of the audience (52%) viewing pre-transmission; almost a fifth watching live, and 29% viewing post-broadcast.
Pre-transmission viewing saw the highest use of non-TV devices, with an average audience of 812,000 on a PC, tablet or smartphone; the vast majority (83%) on the bigger two screens and only 136,000 on smartphones.
Live viewing was almost entirely on a TV set, with only 12,000 watching live on a PC, tablet or smartphone.
