It's official: New research shows streaming has finally overtaken TV and radio in Australia
Welcome to a Tuesday update from Unmade. Today: We can reveal that new government funded research shows that for the first time, Australians now spend more time watching streaming subscription services than they do free to air television. And more of them now listen to audio content via streaming than the radio.
Plus, further down, we cover off a shocker of a day on the ASX as the Unmade Index is dragged down to a new low.
The content of today’s full post - and there are some incredible stats - is available only to Unmade’s paying members. That could be you. Not only can you see today’s members-only edition, but you get access to the full Unmade archive, which goes behind a paywall two months after publishing.
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Inflection point: We’ve just reached the moment when streaming overtook broadcasting
It’s not the snappiest title. “Communications and media in Australia: How we watch and listen to content” doesn’t do justice to the gold contained in the annual research report funded by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
The data, which has been tracked for the last seven years, tells much of what we need to know about the trajectory of mass media in Australia.
One mystery is why the latest report was released with so little fanfare. It was quietly uploaded to the ACMA website at the end of last year without a press release or announcement. As far as I can tell, I’m the first journalist to stumble upon it.
A possible reason for the low key approach may be political: With media regulations before Parliament, some of the data about the swing towards streaming undermines arguments of those lobbying for special treatment for the TV companies around sports rights.
Trends covering television and radio leap out.
In 2023, viewers for the first time spent more time watching paid streaming services - an average of 5.8 hours per week (up from 5.5 hours in 2022) - than they did free to air television which fell from 6.6 hours to 5.6 hours.
Startlingly, in the key advertising demographic of 25-to-34, the group seems close to abandoning the traditional TV broadcasters, spending an average of just 1.4 hours a week with live TV and just 1.2 hours on catchup free to air. That’s compared to seven hours on paid streaming services and 6.4 hours per week on Reels and TikTok-style short form content.
We’ll dig into all of that more in a moment, including the broadcasters’ case for (some) optimism when you delve further into the numbers.
And radio hit a similar inflection point in this new data. The number of people who said they listened to the radio over the previous week fell from 75% to 69%. That saw radio overtaken by music streaming where the number was 70%. And for the first time, the data shows that most Australians no longer have a radio at home.
There’s a lot more detail below the paywall.