TV vs Video – in numbers
The faster the internet gets – for the web and mobile – the more mind-blowing the video viewing statistics. Every day more than 20 billion videos are viewed on YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook, meaning each visitor to those sites watches more than 10 videos per day.
Add other video sharing services like Vine, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, Photobucket, LiveLeak, Flickr, DailyMotion, etc. plus streaming video platforms such as Viewster, Netflix, Amazon, etc. and the online video viewing numbers are astronomical.
TV vs Video
Yet, TV viewing numbers, although flat in some regions and declining slowly in others, still dominate. According to eMarketer –
Despite the drop, traditional TV still dominates when it comes to time spent with video. Television commands 78.4% of US adults’ time spent watching video. By comparison, this year US adults will spend an average of 1 hour and 8 minutes a day watching digital video—21.6% of time spent with video overall.
Some 80% of the households in the world have access to either free or subscription TV. In comparison, by 2016 only 49.5% of the global population had internet access. On the other hand, global mobile phone subscription has grown to 63% (the 4.7 billion unique subscribers have 7.6 billion mobile connections, thus many people own more than one phone).
Obviously, part of the reason that TV attracts more eyeballs than online video is the prohibitive data costs and slow lines in many countries.
By the way, the weather is the most watched program on TV.
TV + Video
The drop in linear TV numbers is being complimented by streaming video. As Think with Google points out, the ways people are viewing video and/or TV are changing:
Freedom of choice
The reasons why people watch either TV or video are diverse. TV remains the premium entertainment vehicle while videos – watched online or streamed – are often used for information gathering as well.
Perhaps the most important factor in the growth of online video watching is immediacy. Want the latest news, gossip, music releases or the quickest way to fix a flat tire? All the search engines include videos in their results. Even so, the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine is testament to the popularity of videos.
But here’s another reason: the number of choices. According to Hubspot, “More video content is uploaded in 30 days than all three major U.S. TV networks combined have created in 30 years.” In fact, the 5 billion videos that are viewed on YouTube daily is only a fraction of their library of 100 billion videos.
Taliban Interview Goes Wrong – video of a TV clip, on YouTube:
To recap, traditional TV still has the most viewers. But TV is becoming “less traditional,” the lines between the delivery of TV and video are merging and the TV set, once a gathering place for the family, is becoming just another gadget alongside the PC, tablet or mobile phone. How you’d like to watch a TV program or video is entirely your choice.