BARB Reveals Brits are TV Crazy

Rachel_Sandford

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The Broadcaster's Audience Research Board (BAR:cool: has just released the TV viewing figures for 2011. According to their research, the average Brit spends four hours and 2 minutes of each day watching TV, around 28 hours and 14 minutes each week. The weekly figure is down by one minute from 2010.

An estimated 97% of UK homes have access to digital TV service and 89% of Brits use on-demand TV. Despite this, live TV viewing is still popular since Facebook and Twitter give real-time updates of shows, encouraging people to watch it as it's broadcast. In fact, BARB research revealed that 90.6% of TV is watched live and 9.4% is watched on time-shifted viewing, which is up from 7.6% in 2010. The increase in time-shifted viewing is likely to be due to the fact that more households now own a DVR service. An additional 1.2% of viewing is done through other devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops, and in the 16-34 year-old bracket, that figure rises to 2.9%.

BBC iPlayer has had the highest number of program requests in the past year, with a record 187million registered in December, marking a 29% increase year on year. The catch-up service's busiest week was right after Christmas when it received 29.7million requests. Top Gear's India special had the most views with 1.7million, but Sherlock Holmes was the most viewed program on a single day, registering 623,000 hits in one day.

Statistics for commercial TV viewing have also been revealed. In the last 10 years, there has been an increase of three hours and 30 minutes in commercial TV viewing. It is now at eighteen hours and 11 minutes. Thinkbox, which is the marketing body fore commercial TV, believes that commercial TV is “ responsible for maintaining the record viewing level” since it accounts for 64% of all linear TV viewing. That also means, however, that people are watching more TV ads, roughly 47 ads a day.

“TV continues to be the most effective form of advertising,” said Thinkbox representative, Lindsey Clay.

She also said: “These figures explain why so many tech companies want to join the TV industry. Many companies are flocking to launch new TV services or social media services that feed off people's love affair with TV,”

“It is obvious that people want to watch TV programmes on the best screen in the home if they can and 2012 will bring more opportunities to do that with the sale of connected TVs and more catch-up TV services to the TV set. And alongside that there is now a wide variety of personal screens to watch TV on which make TV even more convenient. Tablets are really delivering an excellent mobile TV experience.”
 
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