The amount of audio-visual content consumed in the UK went up last year, but the way that we access it is rapidly changing.
According to Ofcom’s Media Nations Report 2021, the public watched an average of five hours and 40 minutes every day.
This was an increase of 47 minutes compared to the previous year, much of which can be put down to the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying lockdowns.
The time spent on traditional broadcast TV increased by nine minutes across 2020, with public service broadcasters including the BBC and Channel 4 achieving some of their highest viewing figures in five years.
The report said that these increases were “entirely driven” by people aged 45 and over, however.
People aged 16 to 24 actually spent less time watching broadcast TV in 2020 than they did in 2019.
By far the highest gains were seen by streaming services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix.
The average time spent watching these video-on-demand platforms almost doubled to an hour and five minutes per person per day across 2020.
Worryingly for traditional broadcasters, separate research by Ampere Analysis found that 42% of people using video-on-demand services said that they could not see themselves watching broadcast TV at all in five years’ time.
Subscriptions to streaming services exploded in 2020
Nearly two-thirds (60%) of UK households had access to such platforms by Q3 2020, compared to less than half (49%) in 2019.
Individual subscriptions to such services also increased substantially, rising from 20 million in 2019 to 31 million last year.
Most individual subscribers were holding multiple subscriptions though and the number held by each might well decrease moving forward.
Netflix currently leads the charge with 14.8 million subscriptions, while Amazon Prime has 9.5 million.
Both companies added more than 3 million viewers in the year up to Q3 2020.
Newcomer Disney+ had 3.4 million subscriptions in 2020, while NOW TV had 1.9 million.
When it came to user-generated video content, YouTube is still the leader with people spending an average of 41 minutes per day watching videos on the channel.
TikTok was also gaining traction and was being viewed by nearly a third (31%) of adult internet users by March of this year.
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