Surprising TV Trends From Comcast STB Data. An Interview with Heather Coghill

Heather Coghill, Senior Director Audience Insights, Comcast Spotlight has been a fan of set top box data for years. And now, with the recent announcement of a new television insights study based on Comcast Spotlight’s footprint, she has more than enough data to discern both national and local market trends.  

But in a media market that offers a choice of many television performance reports, why release another one now? “When we first unlocked our set top box data, we saw that it was uncovering new insights which we publicized internally,” she explained. “We shared the results with our clients. Now we want to release the results to a wider audience.” Indeed, the insights gleaned from the set top box data dispels many myths regarding consumer preferences and gives greater clarity to both advertisers and programmers on viewer behaviors.

The Data

The report culls insights from over 17 million Comcast households across 65 markets. This is, “based on approximately nine billion hours of viewing data captured in Q1 2019. To put that number in perspective, it would take over 100,000 years to watch one billion hours of content,” she noted.  All of this data is managed by an analytics team. “We have data scientists and people who are used to working with big data and they cultivated it for us.”

For Coghill, time spent per day was an important metric. “The press reports that TV is dying, but in fact people are spending a lot of time with TV daily – over 6 hours – and it was up year to year.” The data shows that “TV is as strong as ever.”

A New Television Landscape

However, “TV viewing has changed,” she stated. “It’s not just about watching the four broadcast networks in primetime anymore. We found that 68% of time spent with linear TV is spent outside of primetime. The sheer number of networks that households are watching total over 34 per month. And the networks vary by household with cable accounting for 65% of all viewing.” The amount of networks viewed per month surprised both Coghill and me and is higher than other analyses based on much smaller samples. “If you just took the most watched network across all of our households, it is 308 different networks,” she added, which means that, “it’s getting harder and harder for advertisers to reach audiences at scale.” For Coghill, all of this speaks to the degree of fragmentation, “which we knew to be true but I was surprised as to how much fragmentation there actually is.”

The report found that primetime is not necessarily the highest viewing daypart, Sunday is not necessarily the highest viewing day of the week and the share of live and time-shifted viewing remained constant throughout the week. These insights hold great implications for programmers, schedulers, marketers and advertisers.

According to the report results, there was a significant uptick in viewing 1Q18 to 1Q19 with viewing on cable networks and Video on Demand (VOD) driving a large part of this growth. Notably, VOD viewership in Comcast homes doubled since 2016. 

Local Market Insights

“The data becomes especially valuable when you look at the local market level, especially when you get into niche audience segments,” because of the ample sample size that the Comcast data offers. “We can look at tens of thousands of households in many markets,” she stated. I found that there were fairly consistent viewing patterns across markets. Examples: The number of networks watched on a market-by-market level ranged from 30-37 and the amount of time viewing outside of prime ranged from 66% to 70%.

In comparing year to year trends, Coghill explained that, “While the big picture trends remain consistent across markets, there are definitely some nuances – households in Pittsburgh spend 6 hours 27 minutes with live linear television daily, while households in Salt Lake City spend 4 hours 41 minutes with live linear television daily. Households in Sacramento spend 1 hour 8 minutes with time-shifted viewing daily (DVR/VOD), while households in Miami only spend 35 minutes a day. When we get into the network level viewing, these differences become even more apparent.”

Stay Tuned

With all of this available data, there will be added analyses in future reports. “We are going to take a deeper look at viewing by market and by audience segments in an upcoming edition,” Coghill shared, “and these reports will come out quarterly going forward.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com