Video Consumption trend and the online video landscape: Media Nations 2021

This week, we’re delving deep into the Media Nations report once again, taking a look at video consumption trends and the online video landscape this time.

The total average minutes of viewing per person per day in 2020 up by 47 minutes since 2019, all the way to 5 hours 40 minutes. Ofcom reported that this was an unusually large increase, related to people spending more time at home during the periods of lockdown in 2020.

The data showed that nearly all forms of video viewing increased year on year. But, the pandemic also accelerated existing trends in video viewing, such as the ongoing shift of viewing away from broadcast television and towards VoD content.

The data also highlighted that the patterns in the viewing of video content in 2020 and early 2021 largely mirrored Covid-19 prevention measures, with noticeable peaks in viewing coinciding with lockdown periods. It makes complete sense, but it’s nice to have it laid out (and we have lockdowns to blame our endless binge watching on now).

So, the average monthly time spent viewing broadcast TV peaked in April 2020, during the first lockdown, with an average of just over three and a half hours ,which is the highest April viewing figure in the last five years.

However, during months when pandemic restrictions were lighter, broadcast TV viewing declined, with figures closer to 2019. This pattern has continued into 2021, with broadcast TV viewing no longer higher than seasonal norms, now that many restrictions have been lifted.

UK drama and live sports have been key audience drivers for BVoD services: The appearance of UK-produced original programming in the top ten SVoD titles in Q1 2021, as well as viewing figures for titles such as Line of Duty, suggest that audiences continue to respond well to locally produced content.  Over on SVoD, Netflix titles have particularly performed well in Q1 2021, with the service dominating the top ten titles by reach New and original series have attracted UK viewers to Netflix, with these titles dominating the Netflix top ten in terms of reach in Q1 2021.

There is some evidence of success for BVoD services also; BBC iPlayer, the highest-reaching BVoD service in Q1 2021, had a Q1 record of more than 1.7 billion streams, up by 22% on Q1 2020.12

January was iPlayer’s most successful month ever, with 652 million streams. The top-performing episode during this period was the first episode of the part UK-produced The Serpent, which was a BBC One and Netflix co-production and had 5.89 million streams on iPlayer; this series in total achieved 33 million streams.13 January was also successful for Channel 4’s VoD service All 4, with almost twice as many views as in January 2020 (+91%). The series It’s a Sin was the main contributor to this success; despite its release date of 22 January it achieved 6.5 million views across its five episodes within that month.

PSB BVoD services also attract audiences with channels or programmes streamed live at the time of broadcast: 15% of viewers said they used BBC iPlayer to watch live programmes, with 7% using ITV Hub or STV Player, 6% All 4 and 3% for My516. Live sports also draw in VoD viewers; the BBC reported that 10 January was iPlayer’s best-ever single day, with programmes streamed 26 million times – driven partly by four third-round FA Cup matches streaming live on iPlayer, including Marine vs Tottenham Hotspur. Later in the year Euro 2020 became the BBC’s highest online-viewed live event ever, with the games streamed a total of 75.9 million times across BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport online.17 ITV’s coverage of the Euro 2020 semi-final game England v Denmark totaled a record 11 million streams on ITV Hub (10.5 million) and STV Player (0.5 million)

VOD habits:

Today, nearly half of UK adults now consider online video services to be their main way of watching TV and film.

In the past year there has been a lot of activity from online video providers, as the summary timeline below shows.

Netflix and BBC iPlayer were the leading VoD platforms by content streams in 2020.

 Netflix was also the UK’s largest VoD service in terms of content streams, which were up by 89% compared to 2019, and reached an all-time monthly high of 1.5 billion in December 2020. This continued into 2021, with the SVoD service reporting 1.88 billion streams in January and 5.5 billion across Q1. Looking good.

Interestingly, over on Netflix Anime and anime-influenced content (a sub-genre of animation) is one of the most popular genres for Netflix viewers – ranking above horror, family, and reality TV (3.5% of total Q1 2021 Netflix streams were Anime).

 Many of Netflix’s top-viewed anime titles are from The Pokémon Company and Studio Ghibli (the studio behind films such as Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro), which it added to its platform in February 2020 in the UK- a good move for the streaming  service, given what was to come. Even more interesting , according to the most recent wave of Ofcom’s Children’s Media Lives study44, for three of the 18 children surveyed, anime had become an important part of their content consumption. These three participants all said that they were drawn to anime because they felt it offered something different to the shows they might otherwise watch. This is a nice little takeaway as it shows that streaming services do offer something for everyone.

YouTube and social video

 YouTube and Facebook remain the largest social video platforms in the UK, but the growth of TikTok has diversified consumers’ viewing diets.

A third (33%) of online adults aged 15+ reported daily watching of short-form video content online during Q1 2021, with this viewing skewing more to younger audiences.

 YouTube and Facebook were the largest social video platforms in the UK in Q1 2021, reaching 96% and 88% respectively of UK internet users aged 18+ in March 2021.

However, as reported in their  Online Nation report, social video service TikTok grew rapidly during 2020 and into 2021, reaching 31% of adult internet users in the UK in March 2021.

 In addition, the proportion of online 15+ adults using TikTok to watch short videos increased from 5% in Q1 2020 to 16% in Q1 2021. .

Almost 51 billion YouTube videos were viewed by UK online adults in the first quarter of 2021

The number of YouTube videos viewed by UK online adults in Q1 2021 increased by 22% compared to Q1 2020, with 44 million online adults viewing a total of 50.9 billion videos. This equates to an average of 13 videos per person per day.

Online Video landscape:

The data suggests that it was alandmark year for SVoD, and an important time for BVoD.

 A combination of factors resulted in 2020 being a landmark year for subscription video-on-demand (SVoD), both in the UK and internationally ; total global SVoD subscriptions increased by an estimated 300 million, passing the one billion threshold to reach 1.18 billion.

 The jump was the biggest annual increase yet, and one that is not expected to be matched over analysts’ forecast periods.

 Among the drivers of SVoD’s latest surge are:

·         the circumstances created by Covid-19 lockdowns, which increased consumer demand for home entertainment (as detailed in the previous chapter).

·         the growing investment in content.

·          the launch of several major new services, reflecting a clear industry shift towards direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming as a core business priority for a growing number of media and technology companies.

Meanwhile, long-term trends have also provided the ideal market conditions for SVoD and other online video services to flourish. Take-up of more capable broadband continues to rise – superfast or ultrafast services were used by almost two-thirds (65%) of UK households with fixed broadband by Q1 2021.  In parallel, ownership and use of connected devices capable of streaming TV is increasing; TV sets are commonly used to watch online or on-demand content, with 79% of TV households connecting their set to the internet (via one ofthe methods detailed in figure 2.1) for this purpose.

Netflix and Amazon still have the most comprehensive SVoD catalogues, but Disney and Discovery expanded their offerings in early 2021.

 The 5.5 million UK households that subscribe to both Netflix and Amazon Prime Video had access to 20,234  titles and 79,521 hours of programming in April 2021.

Disney+’s catalogue remains small compared to its rivals, but the addition of the Star brand – including a significant influx of drama programming – in February 2021 increased total content hours by 81%, reaching 8,964 by April. Discovery+, meanwhile, has been steadily increasing its content hours in early 2021, with additional factual and reality programming taking its total hours to 12,020.

 The size of NOW’s catalogue is set to significantly increase in the second half of 2021, with Sky parent company Comcast announcing in July that it would be integrating subsidiary NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service, which launched in the US in July 2020, into both the Sky TV and NOW offerings. This represents around 7,000 hours of content from NBCUniversal and its subsidiaries, which include Universal Pictures, Focus Features, DreamWorks Animation, and Illumination.

The size of Amazon Prime Video’s content offering fluctuated in the second half of 2020 and early 2021; the recent drop in total hours is the result of Amazon appearing to trim its catalogue to reduce the volume of more dated programming, particularly older films.

But overall the SvoD landscape is continuing to evolve.

Although there were some success stories for BVoD in 2020, overall increases in viewing time have been modest compared to other on-demand services. The PSBs’ respective BVoD services had mixed performances in 2020. The BBC reported a 31% increase in iPlayer programme requests to 5.8 billion, while Channel 4 reported a 26% increase in All 4 views to 1.25 billion, with digital accounting for 12.5% of total Channel 4 viewing.

But ITV, which was hurt by the loss of pivotal shows such as Love Island to Covid-19 production restrictions, saw long-form online viewing hours decline by 5% to 482 million.

 Although SVoD services attracted new subscribers in significant numbers during the pandemic, the proportion of online 18-64 year-olds using BVoD dropped for each of the four main services in Q3 2020, with a particularly severe decline of 8 percentage points for ITV Hub. BBC iPlayer’s monthly reach dropped further in Q1 2021, but the commercial PSBs’ BVoD services all recovered, with All 4’s reach rising to well above pre-pandemic levels.

So there you have it- the current shape of the trends and landscape for TV viewing and online video.