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 ?
