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Viewers stick with live TV despite drop in hours

Despite all the hype about consuming content on different devices, the vast majority of Australians still watch broadcast TV live on their home TV sets.

However overall viewing levels of both free-to-air and subscription TV have continued a 5-year slide.

Those trends are confirmed in the Australian Multi-Screen Report from Regional TAM, OzTAM and Nielsen for the first quarter of 2015.

The report shows 88.4% of all viewing takes place on the home TV set. Australians watched an average of 89 hours and 28 minutes (89:28) of broadcast TV in the quarter, down from 93:16 in Q1 2014 and 92:39 in 2013.

Despite the rise in time shifting, 91.6% of all broadcast TV viewed on TV sets is still watched live. In a typical month (February 22-March 21), playback viewing, which occurred within 8-28 days of the original broadcast, accounted for just 1.66% of all TV viewing across the day, up from 1.06% a year ago.

Internet-capable TVs and tablets are in 30% and 47% of homes, respectively, while personal video recorder (PVR) penetration has levelled off at 56%.

Yet only 11.6% of all video viewing – both broadcast and non-broadcast content – happens on screens other than the TV.

OzTAM CEO Doug Pfeiffer said: “Overall, nine in ten people watch broadcast TV each week, averaging nearly three hours of ‘traditional’ TV viewing per day across the population. We continue to see Australians spend a little less time at the ‘full buffet’ of live linear television and a little more time viewing ‘a la carte’, watching their favourite TV shows when they want. Also, there is an increase in time shift viewing beyond seven days.”

Each month 13.3 million people watch some video on the internet (including broadcast TV and non-broadcast content), an average of 6:57 per month (down 51 minutes from 7:48 a year ago).

Nielsen’s annual Australian Connected Consumers report shows 75% of online Australians aged 16 and over say they ever multi-screen while watching TV, compared with 74% a year ago.  Slightly more women than men say they have multi-screened (76% compared to 73%).

More than one third of multi-screeners say they do so daily and 85% report doing so at least once a week.

Some 31% of online Australians aged 16+ say they triple-screen, up from 26% the previous year.

  1. I don’t believe it, who would watch free to air TV
    nothing but repeats 17 mins of ads every hour then the pop up cross promotional ads, water marks bigger then your fist, I would say free tv has a shelve life of less than 10 years, and that’s being generous
    come on low definition channels dedicated to junk items
    I have also noticed that Free to air TV are duplicating the movies on offer from Netflix, yea that’s really smart, a 90 min movie continually interrupted with ads pushing it out to a plus 2hrs,
    with the thousands of movies available world wide lets copy what Netflix And others are showing, but there motive is people wont have to pay to see the same movies and shows and they will stay dedicated WRONG I gladly pay not to be bombarded with ads and cross promotion crap
    as for FOXTEL its game over for them

  2. TV is a load of rubbish, repeats and ads. The supposedly new Death in Paradide is NOT!
    We have seen it months ago. Also Kingdom is supposed to be a new series also….NOT.
    And so it goes on. Do the powers that be think we are idiots?
    Stop lying and give us some new programmes. It is not that they can’t afford it with all the ads they stuff in. I used to work in TV advertising and know just how much money they make. It is staggering. Give us a fair go.

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