Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 16, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Television channels are increasingly losing their regular audiences. Although TV remains the most popular mass medium, individual channels must say goodbye to their formerly very loyal groups of viewers. As a current British study by consulting company Accenture shows, users today tend to develop a strong attachment to an individual format rather than to a channel. The vast majority of TV viewers who consume more than three different programmes a week also watch them on more than three different channels.
According to Accenture, this “channel-hopping” trend demonstrates that users are much more loyal to their favourite programmes than to a particular channel brand. However, 97 percent of respondents in eight different countries at least said that they watch television at least once a week. In that respect, the medium itself is doing well, but the study’s findings give individual TV stations cause for concern. Above all, many users are dissatisfied with traditional TV – advertising breaks and being tied to fixed broadcast times attract criticism.
At the same time, it is once again confirmed that dissatisfied viewers take matters into their own hands and find new ways to see the programmes they like. One in three adults now uses alternatives to traditional television to receive the desired programmes. This trend is particularly evident among young viewers. According to the study, for example, 46 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the USA watch programmes on mobile devices every week.
Paid on-demand services are also used primarily by the under-35 age group. Although pay TV generally has a relatively difficult position in Germany compared with other countries, fee-based video-on-demand offerings are developing quite positively here too, industry expert and Goldmedia Managing Director Andre Wiegand tells pressetext.de. He also confirms the trend towards alternative reception methods. “A quarter of Internet users now obtain video content online every week,” the expert adds.
