UK public spend third of 2020 waking hours watching TV and video
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 05 August 2021
It’s common knowledge that the Covid pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns drove a huge uptake in streaming but now UK broadcast regulator Ofcom has put numbers on just how high this surge was.
Ofcom online nation aug 2021
Ofcom’s Media Nations 2021 report – its annual study of the nation’s media habits – has found that with people across the UK under some form of lockdown restrictions for most of last year, UK adults sought solace in screens and streaming in 2020 spending more than 2,000 hours, about a third of their waking hours, watching TV and online video content. Total viewing of audio-visual content increased by 47 minutes to 5 hours 40 minutes per person per day in 2020 relative to 2019, with nearly all forms of video viewing increasing year on year.

The increase was mainly driven by people spending almost twice as much time , specifically one hour and 5 minutes per day on average, watching subscription streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney.

UK subscriptions to streaming services climbed by over 50% last year to reach 31 million, up from 20 million in 2019. By September 2020, three-fifths of UK homes were signed up, compared with 49% a year earlier. More than half of UK households (52%) had a Netflix subscription, meaning the service’s customer base now exceeds that of UK pay-TV providers combined for the very first time (48%).

YouTube remained the most popular user-generated online video service, with people spending an estimated 41 minutes per day viewing YouTube videos in 2020. In Q1 2021, the total number of YouTube videos viewed by UK online adults was 22% higher than in Q1 2020. Yet the study also showed that people in the UK have diversified their viewing with new types of services such as TikTok, for which viewing grew even more rapidly than YouTube, reaching 31% of adult internet users in the UK as of March 2021.

One key driver for the surge in streaming was the concurrent take up of superfast/ultrafast broadband in UK homes during the time. Such connections were found in 65% of households in 2020, with 79% of TV households connecting their TV set to the internet.

The launch of new services also led to growth in on-demand video viewing. Ofcom noted that the first Covid-19 lockdown coincided with the launch of Disney+ in March 2020 which provided an additional boost to SVOD services. It added that original programming was proving the biggest draw for streaming services, and that SVOD providers were continuing to increase their content spend and boost the volume of originals and exclusives available on their services.
However, Ofcom also observed that while broadcaster VOD (BVOD) catalogues lacked the overall scale of SVOD offerings, but they continued to be the main destination for UK programming, much of which is fresh from broadcast TV.