Covid-defined consumption patterns set to persist
Details
Joseph O'Halloran
| 16 December 2020
A study from market research company AudienceProject predicts the ongoing Covid-19 crisis is likely to influence TV and streaming consumption patterns beyond 2020 which has shown weekly traditional viewing continuing to drop while the consumption of online services has seen an enormous jump.

The online survey was carried out in the fourth quarter of 2020 with respondents selected from Nordic, German, UK and US panels consisting of more than 1.5 million people and weighed to achieve representativity on the more than 7.000 respondents who completed the survey.

Assessing overall consumption, the analyst said that there were some “seismic” shifts in the streaming section. It said that not only was streaming here to stay but that there were also increasing indications that it was doing so at the expense of traditional TV.

The research indicated that traditional TV was undoubtedly under pressure, but the decline has actually slowed in several markets this year. Reported irrelevance and overexposure of traditional TV advertising and a general intent to stream more, are not going to give the format an easy ride next year said AudienceProject.

In an indication of the traditional TV viewing decline, the study found that 59% of Americans watched traditional TV on a weekly basis compared with 68% in 2019. This was the lowest share among covered markets. Indeed, traditional TV viewing was declining overall in all countries apart from Finland. As many as 93% of Americans felt that they see the same TV advertisements too many times, this marked the highest share among markets covered. Moreover, almost two-thirds (64%) of Americans felt that TV advertisements were irrelevant to them.

In all only just over a third (34%) of Americans saw themselves watching traditional TV in five years while at the same time streaming vastly increased. Four-fifths of Americans were streaming on a weekly basis compared with 63% in 2019, the highest share among covered markets, and viewers in the country were rapidly replacing traditional TV with streaming. Around a quarter of Americans both watched less traditional TV and streamed more compared with 2019. The result was that many Americans can only be reached on streaming platforms.

A fifth of the overall sample were pure streamers, that is not watching traditional TV at all. A third of Americans were found to be not watching traditional TV but were streaming.

Looking at what such viewers were watching, the leading five streaming platforms in the US were Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Disney+ and Hulu. Just over a third (36%) of American Disney+ subscribers regarded the service as better than expected and the same percentage consider watching content on YouTube as watching TV.