TV accounts for three-quarters of UK video viewing, almost all video advertising
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 09 March 2017

Despite digital alternatives such as subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) and over-the-top (OTT), the enduring power of the big box at home rolls on in the UK, reveals research from Thinkbox.

In its study, the trade association for the UK’s commercial broadcasters combined 2016 data from The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB), comScore, the IPA’s Touchpoints 2016 study, Ofcom’s 2016 Digital Day study and Rentrak box office data to give a like-for-like comparison of estimated video consumption in the UK.

The analysis found that total video consumption increased year-on-year from an average of four hours, 35 minutes a day in 2015 to four hours, 37 minutes in 2016. TV accounted for 74.8% of UK video viewing, a fall of only 1.2 percentage points year-on-year, with live TV commanding three-fifths of total video viewing, a 1.6 percentage point slip annually. Live TV playback accounted for 10.8% of viewing and broadcaster VOD 3.9% respectively, compared with 11.4% and 3% in 2015.

Looking at the alternative to the box, Thinkbox found that YouTube accounted for 6.4% of average video viewing in 2016, up from 4.4% in 2015, while the usage of SVOD services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime barely rose from year to year, collectively accounting for 4.1%, compared with 4% in 2015. Interestingly despite a big push into video by the social media platform over 2016, Facebook was 1.7%, down from 2.2% in 2015.

The average person in the UK watched 20 minutes of video advertising a day in 2016. TV advertising accounted for 93.8% (18 minutes, 53 seconds a day), compared with 94.4% in 2015. Regardless of the device it is watched on, TV advertising was watched full screen and most likely with the sound on. YouTube accounted for 0.7% of the video advertising that was seen in 2016, up from 0.5% in 2015 while online video collectively accounted for 5.2%, up from 4.7% in 2015.

The data clearly shows that TV is the pre-eminent form of video said Thinkbox CEO Lindsey Clay, adding: “TV is a trusted, high quality environment for advertisers that is proven to work. It has a huge variety of premium programming across every genre and can satisfy the demands of many thousands of advertisers simultaneously and for the long-term. Now more than ever these are crucial distinctions between it and a lot of other types of video.”