SME#8: US, UK, France, how's your 2022 TV performance doing?
Streaming Made Easy #8
Welcome back to Streaming Made Easy. This week, we dive into TV viewership data in the US, UK and France and see if we’re back to pre-COVID levels or not.
Today at a glance:
Analysis: US, UK, France, how’s your TV performance doing?
Streamer snapshot: OCS, Pay TV service from Telco Orange
Content Recommendation: “Frankenstream, this monster that devores us”
💡 Analysis:
In 2022, Reed Hastings painted a dark future for Broadcast Linear TV by predicting its death in 5-10 years.
Within our industry, reactions flooded and opinions diverged a lot.
I’m of the opinion that traditional TV is struggling (decline in viewership numbers can’t be ignored) but has the ability to transform to stay relevant.
Now, today let’s take a look at the TV audience ratings in 3 markets: US, UK and France to see how traditional TV performed in 2022.
US
Nielsen released 2022 viewership numbers (live + time shift) and it stings. Only 37 networks out of 159 registered growth with their viewership numbers. If you look at the top 20 networks, only ESPN grew viewership by 13% YoY.
On average, 34.89M prime time viewers tuned in (out of the 332M+ population!).
For the full list 👉 Variety
Now, what did Americans watch on traditional linear TV?
Football, the Olympics (21.7M viewers), the Oscars (17.5M viewers) and Kevin Costner (13.05M viewers for Season 4 finale).
As always, NFL games brought the biggest viewership numbers, no wonder Youtube TV decided to invest 2-2.5$ a year to secure rights to Sunday night games.
For the full list 👉 Variety
UK
According to OFCOM’s Media Nations 2022, in the first half of 2022, UK individuals watched 2h24 of TV, way below the viewing time registered the 3 previous years.
This decreasing trend impacts all demos.
Numbers for S2 2022 aren’t available. Now, I did get my hands on November ‘22 figures and UK individuals watched 2h46 of TV, a 22 minutes uptick, most likely due to the World Cup.
Brits love reality TV almost as much as they love football with ITV scoring its two biggest ratings of November with:
FIFA World Cup 2022: ENG v USA (25 November)
12.85 million viewers
I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! (6 November)
12.34 million viewers
France
Médiamétrie released its 2022 numbers and the French population watched 3h26 of television daily.
Television viewing time means any screen, live & replay, anywhere.
Comparing these numbers to 2020 & 2021 isn’t helpful as stay-at-home obligations boosted TV audience ratings. Now if you look at 2019, the viewing time decreased by 14 minutes in 2022 across all demos.
No demo is spared but year on year women below 50 (-25 minutes), CSP+ (-21 minutes) and 15-49 years old (-19 minutes) are the ones who decreased their viewing time the most.
Now how much TV time did each demographic watch?
What are the top genres bringing the biggest ratings to TV channels?
Sports, sports, a bit of politics and TV series.
TF1 secured the top 5 audience ratings with the 5 World Cup games from the French National Football Team.
Another sports competition brought France 2 its best audience with 9.09M viewers tuning to win the French rugby team win against England.
Politics and TV series also brought France 2 solid viewership numbers.
Here’s the full list of top ratings.
Conclusion
The downward trend continues. We’re back into our pre-Covid habits i.e. watching less traditional TV.
It’s interesting to compare these 3 markets:
All of them are down but the US and UK experience stronger decline with live TV viewing representing 50.6% share of total video viewing time while France was closer to 70-80% of share (Omdia, 2021).
All of them see sports events bringing the highest viewership numbers.
The 16-34 demos watching an hour or so of TV every day.
I can’t predict traditional TV’s future but if sports, news and high quality TV Series keep coming, I don’t see it dying anytime soon. It’s more a matter of seeing the generational gap deepen.
📺 Streamer snapshot: OCS
Back in 2010, Orange was the 1st French telecom operator to vertically integrate content and broadband. Their Pay TV bouquet, OCS, was the home of HBO (like Sky Atlantic) with 1st runs of HBO shows. But OCS was more than that:
➡️ It was 5 TV channels (now 3) with distinct brands and programming,
➡️ Incredible acquisition of shows like The Walking Dead, Handmaid’s tale.
➡️ Its own label “OCS Signature” where they did excellent TV series on a budget.
➡️ The 1st channel to release TV series day and date with the US (an operational challenge!).
➡️ A line up of new and library movies across many genres.
Today, it will fall under the C+ banner but I do hope the brand and the DNA remain as a standalone offering.
🎬 Content recommendation: “Frankenstream, this monster that devores us”
A 4-part documentary series on the ecological impact of streaming. I know my streaming viewing habits have an ecological impact but I was keen to learn more on that topic. This documentary is a good start, although it does tend to hammer the point without enough nuances.
To watch it 👉 Arte.tv
That’s it folks. I hope you found this interesting and if you did, please don’t hesitate to tell your colleagues, bosses, friends & families about it.
Enjoy your weekend and see you next Friday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!
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