Is TV viewing beginning to plateau?
A series of blogs about the broadcast industry, narrated by David Brennan…
One of the most notable media phenomena of the 21st century so far has been the inexorable rise of television viewing.
Despite all of the disruptions that TV was expected to suffer – due to the rise of DTRs, search, online viewing, social media, wireless broadband, smartphones, connected TVs and the rest – the net result has been a consistent rise in TV viewing (especially TV commercials), both via the TV screen and via other devices.
Average hours of TV viewing, as measured by BARB (therefore excluding viewing on other devices), have increased every year so far this century. The average individual now watches more than four hours of TV every day and total TV viewing has increased by 10% on levels a decade ago.
Commercial viewing has risen even further and the amount of viewing TV commercials, at normal speed, has risen by almost a quarter in the last five years alone.
Just how long can this continue? The latest data suggests TV viewing may be close to reaching a plateau and the new forms of viewing – such as via internet or mobile phones – are also experiencing a slowdown in their rate of adoption.
In the first nine months of 2011, total TV viewing levels were up less than 1% on 2010, suggesting 2011 could show the flattest year on year viewing performance since the 1990s. Commercial viewing is up 5%, though this has largely been driven by digital switchover, which is almost complete.
Although the current figures are well ahead of any of the predictions from ten years ago, all the signs are that TV viewing has reached saturation point, or is not far from it.
Even the new forms of viewing, which have risen exponentially in line with total viewing, are beginning to see some slowdown. The latest BARB Bulletin shows claimed viewing via the internet and mobile phones and while the numbers of people engaging with both is increasing, the underlying numbers look less impressive than we might have expected.
Let’s take viewing TV via the internet – in total, 36.2% of the UK population watched some TV this way during November 2011, up from 34.4% at the same time last year (an increase of 5%). Research also shows that 7% of individuals accessed TV content via their mobile phone in November 2011, up from 5% last year.
Theoretically these new forms of viewing should keep TV levels on the rise, even as BARB reported viewing begins to level off or even decline. However, if we look beyond the headline numbers, internet and mobile TV viewing levels are less impressive than they first appear because the numbers of regular users are not necessarily rising in proportion.
Normally, when a new technology is adopted, the increase in total penetration is soon overtaken by the increases in the numbers of loyal or regular users, as the activity takes hold.
In the case of TV viewing via the internet, the increase in weekly and monthly users is rising no faster than total penetration. The number of weekly users has only risen by 3% across the year.
For TV viewing on mobile phones, the number of regular users is outstripping total users – just – but given smartphone penetration is well over 50% by now, total user penetration of just 7% (and less than 3% using weekly) is not terribly impressive.
Given that the digital switchover is almost complete, pay TV is almost at saturation point and most of the new technologies that have affected TV viewing are already well-established by now, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that TV viewing is also reaching saturation levels.
There are only so many hours in the day for us to engage in any media activity, and TV’s ability to eat up an average four hours per day of our time has been astonishing. Still, all good things come to an end and in the current age of austerity, maybe a plateau is not such a bad thing anyway!