About five years ago, I wrote about how much TV viewing has really changed;

So - 85% of viewing is definitely not watched "as a family", because nearly half is watched alone... but that said, the point here is that I'm not seeing anything here that makes me think that there has been a significant change in viewing behaviour over the last decade. (Interestingly, we watch more TV on our own in the summer months- which is when we tend to watch less TV overall.)

This is a chart of the share of viewing time spent alone - ie. with nobody else in the room, whether or not they are actually "watching" the TV;

Since then - well, things have obviously changed.

Covid and lockdowns had a massive impact on the time people spent at home vs. out of home, with the longer-term legacy of working from home being increasingly 'normalised' (the current trend seems to be a gradual return to the office - but at least day or two WFH seems to be the 'normal' for what was 100% "office-based" work before.

SVOD subscriptions have rocketed; more TV viewing is to stuff that never had a TV broadcast.

Phones have got faster, and we've gone to 5G - making watching video on other devices a virtually frictionless experience.

More people are watching new platforms like TikTok.

AI is about to change the world again - and is already flooding social media feeds with growing volumes of slop.

So, how have those changes manifested themselves? What does an updated version of the chart above look like?

I've coloured 2020 - the obvious 'change point' black to make it clearer where all that dramatic change in behaviour really kicked off.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose…

(Footnote 1- this data is about viewing to television sets; whatever it is that is being viewed, based on Barb Audiences' data. I've written extensively before on what I think "television" is, and in my view, its basically "whatever is on the TV". There's a whole other conversation where that might have come from and which "pipe" it went down to get there - but my personal interest and focus is always on the media behaviour rather than the content.)

(Footnote 2 - In case you were wondering why the data only goes up to June, its because I wrote this post in July as a draft, forgot to click 'publish', and just spent ages trying to find the link to a thing I knew I had written but couldn't find. Whoops.)