Twice a year, the company examines their subscribers’
viewing trends in aggregate, compiling them into an extensive TV Viewership
Report. The most recent study was just released and contains a wealth of
takeaways. There are even a few surprises, especially (spoiler alert) about Sports.
Coghill, shared the results with MediaVillage.
TV Viewership Report Takeaways
The report
highlights, according to Coghill, “big picture viewing trends.” These big
picture trends revealed some surprises. For one, after monitoring the data, she
scoffs at those who predict the demise of linear TV. “There is a narrative out in
the press that television viewing is dying, and what we’ve seen in the two
years we have been tracking this internal viewing data is that viewing has
actually increased every quarter year over year for the past eight quarters.”
This
continued growth is, “a positive,” she affirmed, “We are seeing TV viewing
remaining strong. In Second Quarter specifically, we saw that there was 15
minutes more per household per day being spent with the television compared to Second
Quarter last year. That equates to about 17 more hours over the course of the
quarter.”
There is
great confidence in these findings. Because the data is so granular, “we are
not limited by sample size,” she explained, “We can see super-niche viewing
that maybe in a panel-type measurement would get cut off because they are not
meeting reporting standards.”
Somewhat
less surprising, at least to me, is the impact of the pandemic on viewing. As people
shelter-in-place, Comcast found that households are spending even more time viewing
television – about 32 minutes more in the first half of the year over the same
time last year. In fact, total hours of TV consumed in second quarter 2020 reached
8.5 billion hours which was an increase of over 200 million hours year over
year.
Breaking it
down by daypart, Coghill found that, “Seventy-one percent of all viewing happens
outside of prime.” On a market by market level, she reported that, “around the
pandemic, we looked at (viewing) regionally and it was interesting. On the west
coast where the coronavirus hit earlier, they saw an uptick in viewership
earlier than what we saw in the rest of the country and then it leveled out
before the viewing for the rest of the country leveled out.”
Even day to
day comparisons showed a shift in recent usage. “Cable’s share increased substantially
from weekday to weekend from 62% during the weekday to 68% on the weekend,” she
stated and added, “That’s significant considering share between the two are
typically consistent.”
Feeling the Absence of Sports
Cable’s
dominance in weekend viewing, “is different from what we have seen in the past,”
Coghill explained, “We think that, because sports aren’t happening, there is
less viewing going to the broadcast networks on the weekends.”
Certainly
sports’ absence has been looming large in any discussion of television viewing
during the pandemic. Even today, there is uncertainty about which sports are
coming back and in what format and schedule. Viewers want their sports programming
and that desire is born out in the data and trends. “Sports returned in Summer
2020 with the MLB season openers and the first NHL and NBA restart games
averaging a viewership increase of 71% over last year,” she noted.
“Sports fans
are hungry for that type of content,” so much so that she discovered, “People
who are sports fans, they are not just a sports fan of one sport. Fifty-five
percent of heavy viewers of one sport watch three or more sports heavily. If
certain sports aren’t happening or are delayed or postponed, it’s not that
those people aren’t tuning in. We can find them wherever they are watching.”
To that end,
Coghill is able to advise advertisers as to how to reach those fans whose favorite
sport might not be available at this time. As part of the study, Comcast data was
placed in a viewing matrix that shows what other programming viewers of one
sport are watching. Take for example a college football fan. “Who knows what is
going to happen with college football – it might not come back. We can tell you
where else you can reach those college football viewers,” she said.
Since sports
fans are sampling other types of sports while they wait for their favorite to
return, there is, according to Coghill, anecdotal evidence to suggest that fan
bases of these secondary sports choices might increase. “When the PGA was one
of the first sports to resume, a lot of us at work were tuning into golf. Not
because we are golf fans but just because we are so hungry for live events,”
she explained.
The data
also showed an increase in viewing fragmentation partially attributed to the
lack of sports tent pole events. But, “viewing has increased,” she stated, “Advertisers
need to move beyond being content focused and using content as a proxy to reach
audiences. (They should) follow those audiences everywhere they may be going.
So maybe it’s more spots across lesser rated networks or dayparts. But if you
aggregate all of those together we can still reach that audience.”
Looking Ahead
Are we
seeing these new viewing habits holding for the long term? “I think there are
some things that will level out,” she admitted, “but I think some shifts are
here to stay. The one thing that we’ve seen that is pretty consistent since the
pandemic started in March is that there has been an increase in daytime
viewing. So as more people are home and kids are home from school more people
are available to watch television during the day. Until we resume some sort of
normalcy, that will be here to stay,” she concluded.
This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com
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