Agtel

Would you miss watching TV?

Turns out UK consumers would miss watching tv the most when given the choice between tv, mobile phone use and surfing the web.

Ofcom have just published some fascinating statistics on this, showing that tv is holding its own even with so many people spending time on the web these days. How’s that? Well, one reason is that half of people are multi-tasking - they’re watching tv while they’re on the phone or have the laptop out in front of them. And maybe unsurprisingly its mostly young people (16 - 24 year olds) who are leading the way in this…

CONSUMERS STILL ATTACHED TO THEIR TVS

Although media multi-tasking is widespread, half of people consume only one type of media in the evening.

This peak-time evening media use is driven by people watching scheduled live television through their TV set, an activity mainly undertaken on its own rather than with other media.

The time people spend watching TV remains stable alongside internet growth with the average person watching 3 hours and 45 minutes of TV per day.

Despite the growing choice in technology and services available,  watching TV remains the activity that most adults would miss the most.   Compared to 2007, a growing number of 16-24s (8 percentage points) and over 55s (7 percentage points) say that watching TV is the activity they would miss the most.

Catch-up TV usage grows

It’s not just scheduled live television which continues to be popular.  Ofcom’s consumer research from the first quarter of 2010 shows that almost a third (31 per cent) of households with internet access  used it to watch online catch-up TV – up 8 percentage points over the year.

Nearly a quarter of people (22 per cent) say they have bought a HD-ready TV set in the last 12 months and sales of HD ready TV sets have now passed 24 million in the UK.  Five million households have now also signed up to HD services through pay TV, freesat and Freeview services.  Although the continuing demand for TVs could be partly explained by falling prices and digital switchover, it also suggests that consumers are as attached to their TVs as they ever were and are hungry for more channels and better picture quality.

And buried deep in the report is this interesting nugget on people making their own videos…

Young people were most likely to have engaged in user-generated content activities online. For example, while a quarter (26%) of 16-24 year olds claimed to have made a short video and uploaded it to a website, only 2% of people aged 55+ with internet access make the same claim.

 

[via ENN via FT]