OK, I’m confused up near the start of the article you have the rather startling (to me) stat
" the proportion of people who tune in each week was down from 83% in 2021 to 79% in 2022."
Then further down you have
“Ten years ago, the average evening audience sitting down to watch the evening schedule at around 9pm was around 20 to 24 million people. These days, on a summer Saturday, the number is getting close to half of that.”
12million is what, 20% of the UK population ?
On the first stat I find that extremely implausible, literally the only person I know who regularly watches live TV is my elderly neighbour (70 pushing 80), fair enough habits of a lifetime and all that. But none of the adults I know watch live TV except for “events” like the FA cup that aren’t on a streaming option. Literally none. How can 79% of the population be watching live tv and I know 1 out of what, 50 odd people do in my social circle ?
The 20% figure is far more reconcilable - I’m sure there’s a decent slice of people still watching East Enders and Love Island, but 79% is just gobsmacking
The Nielsen ratings could have a bit of a flaw. A few years ago I was approached myself to take a box.
At the time, I wasn’t watching live TV at all, and I didn’t want the faff of a monitoring box in my living room for £100 of vouchers.
This could mean that the metric gets skewed towards linear viewers: 1:10000 homes might have a box, but those boxes might be disproportionally accepted by people who already watch tv.
That’s a good point - I know polling is becoming problematic because the majority of people still retaining landlines are older and conservative, it has become quite difficult to achieve demographic balance for the sample for polling (and internet polling has known biases too)
79% and 20% are two different stats. The 79% is the percentage of people who at some point, any point, in a week watch live TV. Even just one minute. 20% is the average share of people who are watching at 9pm, so one in five people are watching.
There’s a lot of selection bias in your estimate. When I walk the dog I go past lots of houses that have their TVs mounted so they are visible from the street, and there’s plenty that are watching live TV. It’s not just major events like sports, but many people have it on for soaps, a distraction for the kids, or just mindless guff like The Chase. I’d say it’s easily one in five out in suburbia.
Sure, but how many of those are watching live to air ? As opposed to the witcher or whatever on a streamer ?
All my friends have TVs and most nights they’ll have something on, but it’s netflix, Disney+ etc.
I was the laggard on ditching the tv licence - I hadnt had an aerial in 10 years, but I paid it for access to the nonlive BBC stuff. After realising we never actually watched anything I asked around and most everyone responded that they’d ditched it, a few kept it for the occasional “event” programs.
It’s certainly not a valid poll (demographics of my pub mates varies on ethnicity but not so much on age and gender), so I appreciate it’s a loaded sample, but the near universal reaction was "you’re still paying a licence, really ? Why ?
Yeah, everytime I read reports like this I’m like “where are all these people” as well, but Germany (where I’m from) reports similar numbers:
81% tune in at least once a week, and 65% (!) daily ( https://www.ard-zdf-massenkommunikation.de/files/Download-Archiv/MK_Trends_2022/2209_Egger_Rhody.pdf )
There might be a number of reasons, but I do think if you only know 1 out of 50 you either are quite young but I would think you are just not aware of them doing so. Even 35% of the 14-29y age group in Germany report they watched TV yesterday. And you’d be surprised how common it is to still watch the evening news or the “sunday crime show” even among younger people, for older age groups it’s simply not a question. In Germany, people above 50 are 50% of the population. Also it heavily depends on your status/class/whatever.
But I do also doubt the validity of the data, since it’s prone to be skewed heavily (I should know, I actually did similar field tests in the past). For once, they’re relying on people’s self reports and those are always terrible. If you ask whether people did anything chances are they just click “once per week” without even thinking about it. Also, the German questionnaire for example asks for “TV programme currently running” but also “watched in a Mediathek” (our version(s) of the iPlayer). However, you can watch the current programme in a Mediathek, so that doesn’t make much sense.
Not young and have two teenagers that don’t watch TV ever (youtube on the other hand, oh lord).
Probably biased sample (age, tech biased etc) but I did a couple of straw polls at the pub when I was thinking of ditching the tv licence and that’s the basis for the statement. They could of course be telling fibs 😁 but the general consensus was “why have the tv licence with what you can get from netflix Amazon disney etc”.
straw polls at the pub
So last time I was visiting friends in Northern England one of the really important events was going to the pub to watch the match. There you go, one room full of people clicking „watched live tv last week“.