How many people do you know who are spending more time watching TV? I personally don’t know any. What with regular sessions on Facebook, the need to work more in a recession (but then we go out less) and the distractions of the internet, gaming and Blu-ray players, there barely seems time to keep up with our favorite TV programs. But researchers all believe that we are watching more and more and that’s not counting the millions of hours of viewing TV on a PC.
The UK researcher the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB) has just published figures in Thinkbox’s Q1 review. Thinkbox is the marketing body for commercial TV in the UK, in all its forms. Its shareholders are Channel 4, Five, GMTV, ITV, Sky Media, Turner Media Innovations and Viacom who represent over 90% of commercial TV advertising revenue in the country.
So why would anybody believe them when they come out with the same type of twaddle that Nielsen Media Research does in the US. The same old predictable, ‘we are watching more and more linear TV, up by an 2.5 hours a week.’
They are not fooling anyone, and by coming out with figures which merely re-assure their falling advertiser base they are just ensuring that advertisers leave the fold ‘en masse,’ disillusioned by a dying industry.
Thinkbox says that these soaring audience figures are due to new technology, updated measurement systems and the economy. Presumably an updated measurement system was brought in because the results were slipping, so it changed the rules, and while a poor economy will usually have more people at home for longer hours, watching more TV, the new technology Thinkbox is referring to is surely the idea of watching streamed video on a PC or using a DVR, and both are actually distracting viewers from linear TV.
In the UK, unlike the US, DVRs have had little chance to take off, having been introduced more recently by the Pay TV operators, but the timeshifted usage of 6.9% of viewing that Thinkbox gives is unrealistic. The two major pay TV operators, BSkyB with around 10 million viewers and Virgin Media with closer to 4 million, each have 25% penetration with DVRs, so close to 3.5 million homes have the devices in the UK across just these two operators. Much of the rest of the UK TV viewing public has only Freeview, the DVB-T free to air service, but this now has DVRs selling in high numbers and every major CE vendor has one in the stores ‘ so perhaps another 2.5 million of these have shipped. That means that around 6 million out of 24 million homes have such a device ‘ around 25%. Thinkbox says that there are even more, in some 44% of all UK homes. This makes it even less likely these homes will be watching more linear TV and there should be a higher base of timeshifted TV, but according to Thinkbox there isn’t.
In fact it looks like the DVR homes only use their DVR on just over 14% of their viewing (resulting in 6.9% of timeshifted viewing if you include homes that don’t have one). Most people who have a DVR admit to shifting 80% of what they watch and fast forwarding through the adverts. The rest of the time the TV may be left on, but no-one is watching it which is perhaps where linear viewing figures come from.
The actual viewing figure given out is that people in the UK watch 30 hours, 4 minutes of linear, broadcast TV each week, during the last quarter (Jan-Mar) of 2010, a rise of 2 hours, 29 minutes on the same period last year, with growth seen across every age group. Even this last part doesn’t seem likely as 60 year olds rarely change their viewing habits ‘ All this points more and more to a methodology change.
The gradual increase in the number of homes watching Freeview, which is DVB-T signaling, has resulted in a most households going from being able to view 4 or 5 analog channels to 44 or more digital channels. Which means there is more choice of viewing in the UK, it’s true. But the core pay TV operators offer substantially more than that, at least 300 channels each, and these have had most of their customers for years. There are very few homes which have only shifted this quarter from 5 channels to over 40. The penetration of digital TV homes in the UK is now 93.9%, so Thinkbox can’t really use this reason again ‘ as we say most homes have some form of digital TV.
The updated TV measurement system is supposed to capture viewing on second TV sets and in on-demand TV, which surely would have meant that VoD viewing would now be accurately ‘removed’ from the figures making a reduction in linear TV viewing hours. If you now count second TV sets, this would obviously increase the number of viewing hours per home, even if someone upstairs is watching TV instead of watching with the family in the living room. The new measurement would now show this as two hours of viewing, not one. So why not show what the OLD methodology would have resulted in had this change not been made? We suppose it didn’t occur to anyone because it would show that less people watched less TV and it’s Thinkbox’s job is to find the opposite. What teenager doesn’t watch TV while doing their homework (how do they do that?) but does this really count as ‘engaged’ viewing?
It also turns out that 78% of people who watch on-demand TV, do it mainly to catch-up with missed broadcast TV, so says Thinkbox with research which it attributes directly to Thinkbox, not to the official BARB figures. This then supports the contention that most time shifted programming is viewed within a week of when it was originally broadcast, once again re-assuring advertisers that adverts will be seen.
The review claims to show that commercial broadcast TV viewing accounted for 61.46% of total viewing in Q1 with the average viewer watched 18 hours, 29 minutes of commercial TV a week in Q1, up by an hour on the same period last year and by about the same when measured against the five year average. These figures don’t include TV viewed on devices other than TV sets. Hold on a second – Does that mean that 38.5% of TV is viewed on something which is NOT a TV set? Wow that’s a lot. The Review doesn’t say how many of these offer far less advertising, which would be a nice figure to have.
Tess Alps, Thinkbox’s chief executive said, ‘Anyone who doubted the continuing importance and popularity of broadcast TV in the UK should hopefully be convinced by these new figures.
“However, record levels are unlikely to continue. We are nearing the peak, if we are not there already. Once analog signals are finally turned off in 2012, the figures are likely to stabilize, but hopefully will remain at these high levels.
“Advertisers are taking advantage of the continued growth in commercial TV and its proven ability to deliver profit to the bottom line, and this is reflected in the forecasts for growth this year.”
This is the mouthpiece of a desperate industry, on the brink of an advertising recovery, which is by no means certain, in a market about to be hit by a swathe of Over The Top TV service launches, the arrival of BBC’s Canvas, which will connect more and more TVs to the internet, and a dramatic rise in PC viewing. Do not be fooled, TV needs 3D or larger VoD libraries or some other gimmick desperately, or its revenues will fall off a cliff over the next five years as viewers desert.