Canadians are spending more time online and less time watching television, finds the CRTC’s annual Broadcasting Policy Monitoring Report.
This is hardly surprising, given that the 70% of Canadian homes are now online, up by 6% from the previous year. And high-speed access is also on the increase, rising from 36% to 60% over the past four years.
But the Internet is not killing TV. According to the CRTC report, TV viewing fell from 28.1 hours a week in 2005 to 27.6 in 2006. As Doug Davis, VP of research for Alliance Atlantis, is quoted as saying, this drop is “not a huge number, but I think new media has a role to play in that”. And some 25% of Canadian adults are online at the same time as watching TV.
The CRTC report highlights some interesting trends. Overall, 50% of adults go online for up to 10 hours a week. But as would be expected, young Canucks, aged between 18 and 25, spend more time online.
Canadians are increasingly watching or downloading television, videos or movies from the Internet:
While TV shows are the most popular (40%), news organisations will be heartened to see that news come second with 38%, followed by sport and music videos (both at 21%). Comedy is surprisingly low at 10%, but this could be because programmes such as The Daily Show may be considered as “news” by young adults.
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Reports of the imminent death of TV are constantly being rejected by British TV producers and broadcasters. So it should be no surprise that Cancadians are yes- watching less TV – but in the convetional way. With i-players they can download and watch any programmes in their own time- and that has yet to be researched. The truth is that TV still draws viewers- especially the news because all of us from all countries are still tied to the tradition of watching nightly news.
The challenge for broadcasters and especially news programmes is to produce content that will continue to attract viewers- especially as 24hour rolling news and updates on all our internet servers like Yahoo and Google do it so much faster.
[...] are likely to show that the trend towards more people getting their news online is gathering pace in [...]
[...] are likely to show that the trend towards more people getting their news online is gathering pace in [...]