There’s no denying that streaming usage is on the rise and traditional TV is on the decline, but standard, linear television is still the most popular form of television viewing in America.
According to new data from Omdia, a technology research and consulting firm, live linear TV (which is content broadcast at a specific time on a specific channel cable on satellite or over the air) accounted for 63% of television viewing in the United States in 2019.
That’s down from 67% in 2018 in the U.S., which does show a downward trend, but it still represents a strong majority of television watching. Overall, Americans watched 19 fewer minutes a day of linear TV in 2019 than they did in 2018 but total TV viewing rose to an average of 306 minutes per person, per day – an increase of four minutes from 2018.
This data comes from Omida’s “Cross-Platform Television Viewing Time Report 2020.”
Other countries tracked by this study, including Australia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the U.K. showed a similar decline. But linear TV still has a very strong presence in some of these markets, accounting for 90% in Italy for example.
Across all markets though, online long-form viewing was one of the biggest areas of growth. – anywhere from 55% in Australia to 10% in the Netherlands. That’s driven largely by services like Netflix and Amazon obviously, but also by social media apps like TikTok, where total viewing increased by an average of 10 minutes, per person, per day to a total of almost 50 minutes a day.
Even though traditional TV is slowly fading, this study shows still a pretty large part of most people’s entertainment habits.
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