Young people don't watch telly – Ofcom

The UK regulator's latest annual Media Nations report shows that for the first time less than half – 48%, to be precise – of 16 to 24-year-olds watched broadcast TV in an average week last year. That's a steep decline from 78% in 2018...but five years is a lifetime when it comes to video and social media trends.

The same age group has also cut down on the amount of broadcast TV it watches, as well as the frequency. 16-24s watch just 33 minutes of broadcast TV per day on average, a decline of 16% in just 12 months, and of that only 20 minutes is spent viewing live television.

The figures will not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with teenagers and young adults. And you could argue that 2023 brought something of a dearth of compelling live content: the New Year's Eve fireworks came out on top with 12.1 million viewers, just ahead of the king's coronation with 12 million and Eurovision at 10.1 million.

Indeed, Ofcom notes that the UEFA Euro 2024 football final between England and Spain – the less said about how that panned out, the better – earlier this month garnered 15.1 million viewers between the BBC and ITV coverage, making it the most watched event so far this year, bettering the top three in 2023 by some margin. But it's probably not wise to bet on the footy creating much more than a blip in the 2024 figures: a reversal of the downward trend is unlikely.

A quick look at the data from the younger age group suggests as much. Children aged between 4 and 15 are also stepping away from broadcast TV, with just 55% tuning in each week last year, down from 81% in 2018.

"Overall, the weekly reach of traditional TV fell by a record amount in the last year," Ofcom said, explaining that it calculates reach by measuring the percentage of all people aged four or more watching at least 15 consecutive minutes in an average week. The figure fell to 75% last year from 79% in 2022, representing the second year in a row of record decline in weekly reach across the UK population.

To add some colour to the overall picture, Ofcom notes that the 45-54 age group also saw an accelerated decline in weekly reach last year to 84%, down five percentage points. However, the 65-plus age group experienced little change, with 95% watching broadcast TV every week.

Those falling broadcast TV viewing figures do not mean that television sets in the UK are sitting gathering dust though. Far from it. We may be watching less TV, but we are committing a lot of leisure hours to video-on-demand (VOD), social media content, and so forth...and we're increasingly using the family telly to do it.

Overall, people in the UK watched an average of four hours and 31 minutes of TV and video content at home last year, an increase of six minutes on 2022. The growth was driven mainly by an increase in usage of video-sharing platforms and VOD services like iPlayer and ITVX, Ofcom says.

84% of TV and video content watched at home last year was on a TV set, Ofcom said, adding that TV screens are also rapidly becoming more popular for watching YouTube content; 34% of time spent watching YouTube at home is now on a TV set, up from 29% in 2022.

Interestingly, while broadcast TV viewing is in decline, the radio is having something of a resurgence. Radio listening hit a 20-year high in the first quarter of 2024, Ofcom's data shows; there were just under 50 million weekly radio listeners across all devices, with users averaging 20.5 hours per week. It attributes the rise to commercial stations successfully attracting new audiences and increasing listening times.

Although still less popular than live radio, streamed music services from the likes of Spotify, Apple and Amazon are on the up, with half of the population using them weekly. And one in five adults listens to a podcast every week, double the number recorded five years ago.

Speaking of podcasts, why not check out the latest Telecoms.com Podcast, which this week features returning guest William Webb discussing his new book, The End of Telecoms History, which asserts that the industry has reached an inflection point and needs to pivot to new business models.