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Linear TV still king over BVOD

Total TV viewing increased during 2020 lockdown, overwhelmingly as linear TV.

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Total TV delivered a national average audience over 2.4 million people daily in 2020.

Data was released yesterday at the Future of TV Advertising Sydney forum by OzTAM CEO Doug Peiffer.

2.3m of those watch linear broadcasting (blue on graph), while 100,000 are via Broadcast Video on Demand (yellow).

But during the national lockdown (Weeks 12 – 22) viewing numbers lifted to 2.7m Total TV viewers, with 5.2% of those as BVOD.

There was another spike when Melbourne went into Stage 4 lockdown at Week 32.

The median age of viewers to linear TV was 57 years -notably outside the 25-54 demo- but it lowered to 41 years for BVOD.

Connected TVs are still overwhelmingly the preferred device for viewing BVOD, well ahead of PC, Smartphone and Tablets.

13 Responses

  1. Does this include Netflix etc. If not, of course figures are lower. A lot of FTA content doesn’t necessarily translate well to evergreen VOD. You probably won’t watch an old episode of The Bachelor 6 months after it airs.

  2. So if GoggleBox are right about “every night 4 million of us sit down to watch TV” that means around 1.6 million are watching TV other than FTA. Mind you, I’ve always thought alot more than 4 million of us watch TV every night!

  3. The FTA streaming services are such a poor user experience. On Nine I have to re-login regularly which is annoying and time-consuming. The Seven stream often buffers even though we have 100NBN and services like Netflix never buffer. The ads are double the volume of any show and navigation controls are poor. Even something that should be simple like finding the nightly news on Nine requires searching.

    1. Yes, I’ve had to password reset on Nine too many times! 7+ no longer works on some of my devices, 10play I hardly use.

      But the number one pet hate about them – I am ok with having ads for something I am using for free – but I am not ok with seeing the same ad every ad break or sometimes even repeated within the same ad break. Ad repetition is a huge problem

      1. I hear you loud and clear, again and again and again and again…

        I recently discovered an old TV favourite of mine from the 1970’s was available on 9 catch up, so started watching the first episode. I lasted 25 minutes. The add breaks were very frequent and yes the same add appeared in every one of them. It did my head in. I gave up watching and ordered the DVD’s online. Yes it’s cost me more in dollars, but I’ve saved a lot in happiness. Lesson learned!

    2. I don’t mind the password thing. SBS has a good account where you can bookmark favourites but my pet hate if I want to fast forward or start a show from the middle it plays double the ads😖.

  4. When you say BVOD. Do you mean the FTA catch up services like 10Play, 9Now etc.
    We have Fetch TV and if I did watch FTA, I would probably just record the shows and skip through the advertising. I wonder if this contributes to the low numbers of BVOD take up for many people… Or do FTA viewers still prefer watching live transmissions, and not time shifted content??

    1. What people? Just as Radio didn’t die, but ditched drama, soap operas, quiz shows and variety to concerntrate on music and talkback, it’s strengths the same will happen to TV. These are average figures but movies, drama and sitcom viewing has been affected with under 40s streaming them more and more. Even for things that people didn’t use to stream, like contest shows it is changing. 285k people have streamed the first episode of MAFS so far.

  6. So BVOD has obsorbed only a fraction of the linear audience that is evaporating massively year on year.

    Shows you how much viewing must go to streaming now

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