What People Watch

This is often the first question asked when I explain how Barb works to people from outside the industry. Sometimes they have even asked for this information – I’m a hoot at parties.

Barb reports TV-set viewing from private dwellings only. This means that viewing from pubs, as well as places like gyms, hotels, care homes and prisons on a TV screen, is not reported. The main reason for this is the need to get consent from everyone in these places that might be viewing on the TV-set in question.

So, what about viewing in the pub? Sky maintain the Sky Out of Home Viewing Panel to track viewing to their channels. This is primarily focused on sports to take account of viewing to Premier League matches in pubs and other settings away from home, where the ad feed can vary from that delivered to homes.

At Barb we conduct a semi-regular study to check on viewing that takes place away from home. We conduct the study during major sporting events like this year’s European Football Championships to get a read on where, what and how people are most likely to view away from home.

Most out of home viewing does not take place in the pub

This study has consistently shown that when people view away from home they are most likely to do so as a guest in someone else’s home. Given that guest viewing is captured in Barb panel homes already this allows us to be confident that we are not missing large amounts of viewing by not monitoring some of the locations mentioned above.

Chart 1: Watching TV away from home is most likely to take place in another private residence

Source: Barb Out Of Home Viewing Tracker 2005 – 2024. Q: Where have you watched television programmes in the last week.

 While viewing in someone else’s home is still the main location for non-home viewing we can see that the proportion of adults watching in this way has declined. From a high-point in summer 2016 of 28% for all adults per week we saw a low in summer 2021 of 15%. Clearly this low was a result of the Covid pandemic, with restrictions on social gathering only lifting in July 2021. A rise in November 2022 while the FIFA World Cup was being played in Qatar makes sense. We would have expected a further rise this summer while the European football championships were being played, but this has not materialised in a significant way.

Chart 2: What people watch away from home is changing and stable

Source: Barb Out Of Home Viewing Tracker July 2019 v July 2024. Q: When you watched TV away from home in the last month, what kind of programme did you watch? (Net all locations)

Comparing to our last summer wave free from Covid influence we see that sport continues to be the most watched type of programme away from home. In other genres we’ve seen minimal movement, but there has been a 7-percentage point increase in viewing of general entertainment programmes and a 5 point rise in viewing of films and music content. These increases for film and entertainment are, at least in part, driven by the measurement of SVOD services that weren’t part of Barb reporting in 2019. In July 2024 almost half of film viewing minutes were with SVOD or AVOD services. And those do seem to be additive to what we were measuring from broadcast channels five years ago.

Large amounts of this sport viewing does take place in a pub, bar or café. Our tracker showed that 89% of those who had viewed in one of these locations had watched sport. Questioning further, the impact of the Euro’s was also clear to see. More than 80% of those watching in these places had watched a match featuring England or Scotland from the tournament. And this was consistent across every age band.

92% of YouTube viewers have watched via the home WiFi network

Having dispatched with viewing in the pub the other question, usually from those with a little more industry knowledge, is what about YouTube? Users of our data are aware that we only track services like YouTube when viewers are connected to the home WiFi network. This leads to the challenge – a fair one – that we are missing viewing that takes place via any other internet connection. In home or not.

In a recent what people watch we stated that monthly reach was a good approximation of total reach for YouTube reasoning that people who viewed via 4/5G were likely to also view via the home WiFi in a given month.

The chart below shows that this is a fair assertion. Only 6% of respondents claim that they never used the home WiFi network when typically watching YouTube. Given the scale of YouTube that 6% has to potential to be a significant number of individuals, so what can we understand from our tracker about them?

Chart 3: Majority always use WiFi when watching YouTube at home

Source: Barb Out Of Home Viewing Tracker July 2024. Q: Which of the following best describes how you connect at home, when you typically watch YouTube?

As we might expect those connecting to YouTube solely away from a home WiFi network are younger – 9% of 16-34s said they viewed in this way. But they are also likely to be slightly more downmarket – 8% are C2DE’s versus 5% being ABC1’s. Regionally we see little variation from the national average.

To return to our original question viewing from the pub is unlikely to be Barb measured anytime soon. However, as we’ve said before, we’d be happy to collaborate more closely with our friends at YouTube to generate more complete measurement of what is an increasingly important part of the viewing ecosystem.

Doug Whelpdale is Head of Insight at Barb. For more information visit: barb.co.uk

Note:

The Barb Out of Home tracker has run since 2005 to allow Barb to maintain a view on if out of home viewing should be added to the main Barb service.

The study is conducted by Ipsos and sampled 2,027 nationally representative individuals aged 16+ during the July 2024 wave.

In previous waves the sample has been 15+. This moved to 18+ due to Covid restrictions on fieldwork in 2021 and has been set at 16+ since the November 2022 wave.

Doug also shared a few highlights in this video below.