Millennials don’t watch live TV most of the time. People aged 18-34 spend 55 percent of their video-watching time consuming content after it has already aired on live TV, according to a new study from the Consumer Technology Association. Only 45 percent of that time is spent with live television.
Of the video millennials do watch, 35 percent comes from streaming services like Netflix or on-demand video from a pay TV. They spend 20 percent of their viewing time watching recorded shows off their DVR.
The switch to time-shifted TV puts further pressure on TV networks that are struggling to make their shows attractive to advertisers and retain audiences — audiences that are increasingly seeking out entertainment elsewhere, such as on Snapchat and Facebook. That’s one of the key reasons why advertisers still pay a lot of money to be next to sports content like the NFL despite its flattening audience: Sports still compel people to watch live.
People older than 35 do spend a majority of their viewing time, or 66 percent, with live TV.
But even so, live TV has been losing ground across all demographics. The share of consumers who watch live TV at least once a week, according to the CTA study, has shrunk from 92 percent in 2014 to 80 percent in 2017.
That viewing time has been supplanted by an increase in TV watching through paid and free websites as well as network websites and apps.
The 2017 data comes from CTA’s Exploring Preferences for Personalized Content Consumption Experiences Study, an online survey of 2,500 people administered between April 27 and May 10, 2017.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
