What People Watch

The Premier League season may be over, but the so-called quadrennial season is imminent: that means the Euro football tournament in Germany, the Olympics in Paris, and the US presidential election (plus a bonus UK General election).

Nor should we forget the T20 Cricket World Cup, a biennial event taking place this June in the Caribbean and US, where England are holders. Chances are, however, that viewer numbers to this will be relatively small.

The joy of sport is that anything can happen. For TV advertisers and their agencies, the joy of sport is that audience behaviour will follow somewhat predictable patterns.

Chart 1 below shows how the sports genre takes a much greater share of viewers’ time in the years where we have big events. Even without the disruption of Covid, which pushed the Euro football and Tokyo Olympics back by a year to 2021, the trend is clear: an obvious spike, with sport’s share generally rising by about 2 percentage points.

Chart 1: Major sporting events see viewers dedicate more time to the genre

Source: Barb. Sport genre share of Total TV Viewing (2010-2021). Share of Total Identified Viewing (including SVOD/AVOD and video-sharing services) from 2022.

Drive to live underlined by 2022 Football World Cup

Sport also produces a jump in live viewing. We have discussed previously how live viewing is not dead, but it is certainly declining. Sport, though, is best watched live. The internet leaves almost no hiding place for those seeking to avoid a result so that they can watch a replay or highlights show later on. It is not the same as avoiding the climax of series three of Bridgerton until the weekend.

The winter World Cup demonstrated this. Those who watched the action from Qatar consumed 28% more live minutes during the tournament than they did in the month before. That compared to an 11% increase for all individuals over the same period. We also see a slight dip of -5% in time spent with pure-play VOD services for the heaviest viewers of the World Cup.

Clip-bait may be giving video-sharing services a lift

But a bumper summer of sport is not necessarily negative for all VOD services. Those who watched the tournament spent 9% more time with video-sharing services during the World Cup compared to the month before. That was against a -2% drop for all individuals over the same period.

Whilst we are not currently measuring Fit-For-TV content on video-sharing services we can only speculate what might be causing this. Fans, of course, will know that YouTube is a rich source of clips and highlights for any sporting event. The world’s biggest football tournament is no different as a quick YouTube search will show you.

World’s biggest T20 cricket tournament is a small UK viewing event

The Indian Premier League (IPL) is eight weeks of cricket action taking place between March and May in the world’s most populous nation and in front of the sport’s most devoted fans. In India it is a commercial and cultural behemoth.

Here attention is less fanatical and audiences are smaller. Nevertheless, the IPL makes a significant impact on viewing to Sky Sports Cricket as we can see in chart two. Overall though, audience levels in the UK for the T20 World Cup will certainly be dwarfed by the football and Olympics (not least because the latter two are free-to-air).

Chart 2: Smaller sports like cricket still produce predictable audience uplifts

Source: Barb. All individuals 4+. Daily minutes viewing to Sky Sports Cricket. March 1st – May 20th 2024.

Sport offers planners clues as to audience behaviour in a packed summer

So, sporting events will have a broadly predictable impact on audience behaviour, be they large or small. The Olympics is a massive global event. In the UK it is screened by the BBC, so irrelevant for commercial audiences in a direct sense. A different dynamic is at play in the Euros, with some games on ITV and some on the BBC.

However, the more time viewers spend with the BBC, the less they will be on commercial channels. We can reasonably speculate that they will spend more time on video-sharing services. Certainly, in the case of the Paralympics — of which Channel 4 will stream 1,300 hours on its YouTube channel — more YouTube viewing seems likely.

We can also clearly see the value that newer services are placing on sport to attract audiences. Netflix, for example, has announced that NFL games on Christmas Day will feature on the service. Similarly, Amazon will begin showing the Champions League in the UK on Tuesdays from the 2024/25 edition.

Then there is the impact on new content releases. We already know that broadcasters tend to avoid big new content drops in the summer, especially if there are big sporting events. It remains to be seen if the pure-play VOD services will act similarly — or perhaps provide alternatives for non-sports fans.

The sports bonanza this summer — don’t forget the cricket’s The Hundred or Wimbledon — means, depending on their clients, there’s plenty of TV for planners to exploit or to avoid. The UK election campaigning that will cover 21 days of the 31-day Euro tournament may add an extra complication, but that was one event that even the Cabinet didn’t see coming.

Who the winners and losers will be is trickier to predict. Mostly, anyway.

Doug Whelpdale is Head of Insight at Barb.

 

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