Typical British viewer last year watched about 77 minutes a week of shows on services such as Netflix and Amazon, although traditional TV is still king

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The popularity of services such as Netflix and Amazon surged last year with the typical British TV fan almost doubling the amount of time spent watching programmes.

The typical British TV viewer watched about 77 minutes a week of shows on subscription video-on-demand services, primarily Netflix and Amazon Prime, in 2015.

This was almost double the 40 minutes a week watched on average in 2014, according to a report published on Thursday by TV industry marketing body Thinkbox.

While the growth rate in the popularity of the TV industry upstarts was impressive, the figures show traditional TV is still king.

Subscription video-on-demand services such as Netflix only accounted for 4% of the 4 hours and 35 minutes per day – 32 hours per week – of video content the average person watched last year.



Traditional TV viewing accounted for 76%, or three hours and 51 minutes per day, close to 28 hours per week.



YouTube also continued to grow in popularity, with viewing up a third to 85 minutes a week on average, with the Google-owned video platform increasing its share of total viewing from 3.5% to 4.4% year on year.

YouTube disputes the figures claiming that viewing per week is significantly higher than the Thinkbox estimates, and that viewing growth is running at a rate of about 60% in the UK.



“TV has expanded in recent years into new times and places,” said Lindsey Clay, chief executive of Thinkbox. “We need to show as accurate a picture as possible of how much TV we are watching, and where TV sits in the emerging video world.”

While traditional TV still dominates viewing, there has also been growth – albeit only from 24.5 minutes a week to 28 minutes a week on average – in consumption on other devices such as tablets, smartphones and laptops.

“What is remarkable is that in the last decade, when so many new technologies and services have arrived that could have disrupted TV, TV viewing has remained so dominant,” said Clay.



