The inaugural Australian Video Viewing Report is a quarterly report comprising research from Regional TAM, OzTAM and Nielsen – which replaces the Australian Multi-Screen Report – has just been released and shows we are watching less TV than we did since quarterly numbers were first made available in 2013.
The survey shows that the overall viewing time has seen an eight per cent drop during this time.
Television views – Click to enlarge
That equates to an average of 10 hours less viewing time a month. Australians now turn on the TV for 111 hours and three minutes a month compared with 117 hours and 30 minutes 12 months ago.
The data will set off alarm bells in car companies which tend to remain heavily reliant on free-to-air TV to get their models front and centre with intending car buyers and comes at a time when the networks have tripled or quadrupled the broadcast time they offer through their supplementary channels.
Live TV events have taken the biggest slide. The report shows that three years ago, the viewing average for live events was 90 hours a month. That has now dropped dramatically to 70 hours – a massive slide of 22 per cent in three years.
The survey confirms a trend that industry observers have been following over the past five to 10 years where daily ratings surveys published in the advertising media showed that most of the top-10 shows broadcast on any given day attracted more than one million viewers each.
But today, five to 10 years on, the same reports show that sometimes only one or two of the top-10 shows have more than a million viewers and at least half of the top-10 shows have slumped to between 400,000 and 600,000 viewers.
This trend is troubling car company marketing chiefs because their opportunity to air their wares before potential car buyers in the home is diminishing as the numbers of hours potential car buyers are prepared to allocate to TV – especially to live events – is being cut back.
However, while the effectiveness of the current TV business model is clearly being called into question, the report doesn’t indicate that television as an advertising medium is set for retirement just yet.
The report states that in-home TV use attracted nearly 20 million Australians to some free-to-air or subscription TV in the first quarter of this year.
“Reach is strong among all age groups,” the report said.
“For example, across the day, two-thirds of 18-24 year-olds, who are relatively light viewers compared to other age groups, watched broadcast TV channels weekly in the latest quarter.
“In prime time, when people generally have the most available time and screen options to view both TV and other video content, weekly broadcast reach on in-home TV sets is 79.4 per cent, representing 18.9 million Australians in people-metered markets.”
The use of online viewing of TV programming and catch-up TV also remains in its infancy.
According to the report, online viewing through connected devices represents just one to two per cent of viewing time. This includes participating in broadcasters’ free online “catch-up TV” (video on demand) and live-streamed content across multiple devices.
It said more content is viewed online during the day on weekends than is viewed online during the week.
By Neil Dowling and John Mellor
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