IHS: European VOD Consumption Up Two Hours a Month

A new report from IHS Markit confirms just how much video consumption is changing across the leading five European markets—the U.K., France, Germany, Italy and Spain—where an additional two hours of on-demand content is being watched each month.

Linear TV viewing time declined year on year across all five markets in 2017. Time-shifted viewing, via personal video recorders (PVRs), has remained flat or declined.

Meanwhile, the share of viewing time devoted to online platforms has increased, with an average of 10 minutes per person per day devoted to online short-form video content (up to 15 minutes in length) and eight minutes to long-form content (over 15 minutes in length).

Total TV and video viewing time in the top five European markets has remained relatively stable for the past six years, at an average of 247 minutes of TV viewing per person each day.

The U.K. leads the market in on-demand viewing. Daily linear viewing time in the U.K. declined by more than eight minutes per person in 2017, as PVR time-shifting also declined for the second consecutive year. However, on-demand viewing added five minutes daily per person, with the U.K. leading in the amount of time spent viewing nonlinear content compared to the other four markets. In France, online long-form viewing time increased by 41.6 percent year on year—or around five additional viewing minutes per person per day. Netflix accounted for three out of four net OTT subscriptions in France in 2017.

“With the increasing volume of consumption moving away from traditional linear broadcast, monetization of on-demand and time-shifted viewing remains a key concern, as ad-insertion and tracking technology has been slow to keep up,” said Fateha Begum, associate director of connected devices and media consumption at IHS Markit. “However, pay-TV operators are still primarily concerned with retaining subscription revenues, for the time being.”

“The shift to OTT consumption signals the need for pay-TV operators to act quickly, in order to retain their foothold in the market,” said Rob Moyser, TV and online video analyst at IHS Markit. “Leading operators are already enhancing their current propositions and embracing OTT, to ensure they capture some of the time spent on other devices and services, so they can stay at the forefront of consumers’ minds.”