EVERYDAY TV
Happy Thursday War & Peaceniks. Are you ready to tune in?
Recently, DirecTV commissioned me for a study on daily TV habits. I partnered with PCH Media to conduct a survey (with a sample size of 9,442 A18+), asking American TV audiences “How much TV do you watch?” I’m presenting the results today at Advertising Week NY. However, I’m posting them here, for you, now.
The question above might seem simple… until you think about just how many different TV and video services you have.
Over the last decade, the Media Industrial Complex has launched myriad services and platforms across a cornucopia of devices. Conceptually this is awesome - limitless content, anything and everything, everywhere and anywhere, all of the time!! In reality, it’s exhausting, frustrating, and paralyzing. The average consumer now has 100 unique logins. FFS, who can even remember all those passwords? (That’s why I use 1234Evan for everything. I probably shouldn’t have shared that on the internet.)
Think about your own habits: Have you ever logged onto a streaming service, couldn’t find anything to watch; logged onto another service, couldn’t find anything to watch; logged on to another service, couldn’t find something to watch, gave up, poured yourself a beer/wine/bong hit and just watched Friends… again?
That experience is becoming an epidemic - The Paradox of Choice is real, yo.
So the question: “How often do you watch TV?” is more complex and nuanced than you might think. To get to a set of actionable answers and insights, we asked specific subscribers and users of specific services how often they watch those services.
Turns out most users of many services watch periodically - once or twice a week - whereas most audiences use very few services everyday.
When you think about your own use of premium streaming platforms, it’s likely a once or twice a week thing. Usually on the weekend, often for a binge or a movie. This is the most prevalent use-case. This periodic usage is exacerbated by churn. How many of you have signed up for a premium streamer, specifically to binge one thing, then cancelled before the next billing cycle? Yeah, a lot of us do.
That’s why Antenna now reports that as many as 40% of new SVOD subs each month are Serial Churners - users who churn through three-to-six services a year.
Between premium binges, many TV viewers are now turning to FAST and AVOD to fill the void. FAST is free (literally in the name), it’s always on, and it’s got a shit-ton of content. That said, FAST usage - even among those who consider themselves active users of the services - is still intermittent.
Which brings us to the most traditional of TV use-cases, Pay TV. While Pay TV subscriptions are falling, those audiences who do subscribe to MVPDs, use the heck out of them - most of them daily.
This sample included subs of traditional Pay TV as well as virtual MVPDs like Sling, Hulu Live, YouTube TV, Fubo, and DirecTV Stream. It should be noted that traditional MVPD subs use their services more often than their newer, virtual counterparts. However, as a group these services are used more often - including daily - far more than any other TV platforms.
(Note we did not include “regular” YouTube in this survey.)
This regular, everyday usage is personified by this study’s sponsor DirecTV, whose everyday usage is impressive. (No, that’s not because they paid for the survey. Yes, their subscribers self-report that they are very avid users. Yes, this was a relief for me since they paid for the friggin’ survey!)
Why did DirecTV commission this study? Why does the regular or irregular use of various TV services matter? Why else - the money!
We only care about how much TV gets watched because that’s how we as an industry monetize what we offer. One measure is subscription retention. The other, and currently the most talked about metric, is advertising.
Recently I published an analysis of new data from Comscore measuring the amount of advertising exposure across all TV services - what I call Share of Ad Voice. The results were surprising to many, but they strongly reinforce the data collected in this usage survey.
In the first half of 2024, 87% of all ad exposure on TV was on Pay TV and Broadcast, while just 13% of ad time was viewed on Streaming.
And yes, this does include “regular” YouTube (which garnered 4.6% Share of Ad Voice). NOTE: This is advertising content that is actually viewed on each channel, platform, and streamer. Since most TV audiences still watch their Broadcast TV via MVPDs, this massive advantage in ad exposure shows how important daily usage of live TV is to the amount of advertising that gets seen.
Streaming enjoys a big share of our television time. However, both sets of data (one a survey, and the other based on actual usage on actual screens) indicate that this viewing most often comes in big chunks a couple of times a week in the case of SVOD, or in fly-by sampling in the FAST use-case.
A sizable portion of regular/daily viewing on Pay/Broadcast TV is due to live programming, including morning and nightly news programs, and of course sports, one of the continued major pillars of Broadcast and Cable TV. But, in my studied opinion, a good deal of the continued daily Pay TV habit comes from a growing frustration with finding things to watch on Streaming (see the log-on/log-off example above) and a reliable belief among MVPD subs that on Pay TV and Broadcast, there is “always something to watch.” That is an advantage for the Pay TV ecosystem. It is also a discovery problem that streamers must recognize and address if they ever want to stem the rising tide of churn. And, if FAST players want more, consistent viewing, they should look for ways off their FAST islands and to integrate more and better into the Pay TV and SVOD ecosystems.
When “we” invented and released the wave of great entertainment tech, “we” promised audiences infinite choice and rich personalization across their Hierarchy of Feeds. Yet, for many users and for most advertisers, this has morphed into a frustrating labyrinth of endless search, with more friction than joy and more silos than solutions. The User-Centric Era will be defined by our audiences. The data - like that above - is the audience’s voice. Despite a good deal of the industry’s conventional wisdom, what viewers seem to be saying is that many still crave familiar, daily regularity on their TV.
I’ll be presenting this data later today at Advertising Week NY. I hope to see you there!
Enjoy your weekend!
ESHAP