It’s a widely known fact that young Americans are watching less traditional TV – as noted in our ongoing quarterly analysis of traditional TV viewing. Our new report – The State of Traditional TV Viewing – takes things a step further, analyzing trends across several demographic groups and examining traditional TV’s place in the wider video landscape.
The report is an invaluable resource, as it combines a host of data sets from high-quality sources to uncover several key insights that go beyond traditional TV’s current state to signal future trends. Among the highlights:
- Traditional TV viewing declines among various demographic groups aren’t necessarily just due to cord-cutting. In fact, in some cases the viewing declines are greater among viewers themselves than the general population at-large. This is an indication of cord-stacking behavior, as viewers choose content over platform, cannibalizing their traditional TV viewing time in the process.
- Black Americans, who have been increasingly represented in primetime TV programming, are the most faithful traditional TV viewers. However, traditional TV is failing to engage other multicultural groups. Hispanic and Asian viewers – who tend to apportion more of their time to on-demand content – are abandoning traditional TV at a rapid rate.
- Viewers increasingly seek convenience from on-demand options, as time-shifted viewing represents an ever-greater share of traditional TV viewing time across demographic groups. However, subscription video-on-demand services are the first port of call for on-demand viewing, offering a better content discovery experience, and increasingly, a more preferable slate of programming.
- Children represent a prime target and opportunity for traditional TV, having undergone less of a drastic shift in viewing time than teens and young adults. But while Netflix has not made kids programming a core element of its originals strategy, traditional TV faces a different threat: the mobile device.
Each of the above highlights is backed by meticulously-sourced data, presented in charts and associated commentary.
The full report – at 54 slides and 32 charts and tables – is available for purchase here. The report is delivered as a PDF file and also as a PPT file for easy copying and pasting of charts.
The study also is accompanied by two Excel spreadsheets containing detailed viewing figures by age group and race/ethnicity among the total population and among TV viewers.
