World Cup 2010 Causes General Rise in Television Viewing

According to recently published research, the World Cup contributed to a rise in the average number of hours people spent watching TV in the first half of this year.

According to data from the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (Bard), in the first six months of this year people were watching an average of 28 hours and 15 minutes each week, 48 minutes more than the same period last year.

Thinkbox the commercial TV marketing body said that the rise could also be due to people spending more time at home, which in turn is due to the economic situation. At the same time most people now have more choices o channels since the country has gone digital.

These findings are backed up by the cinema chain Cineworld’s financial results for the first half of the year, they reported a 3% fall in admissions. According to the chief executive of Thinkbox, Tess Alps, there are now new ways of measuring viewing time which encapsulate second television sets and watching programmes on demand.

She said, "We know that technology is also making TV ever more attractive and we should never underestimate the fundamental importance of compelling content."

These figures were published in Thinkbox’s half year viewing review and they only include time spent watching a show live or within a week of it being broadcast.

Their figures also show that commercial TV accounts for 62% of viewing. Programmes which have been recorded and on-demand services account for 7.1% of television watched and 80.4% of “time shifted” viewing happened within a week of the original broadcast.

At the same time a report has been released by the media regulator Ofcom in which they suggest that over half of the population aged 65 or over think that standard of television has dropped.

Ofcom has interviewed 2,044 adults in the period from April to October of last year.

65% of the people who thought that TV standards had dropped put some of the blame on the increase in the number of repeats and a third of people claimed that there was a “lack of variety”.

The Ofcom report also says that in the UK people spend about seven hours a day watching TV, on the internet and using their mobile phones.