Samsung Ads: TV AVOD viewing more than doubled in the last year

Streaming overtook linear viewing during the pandemic and has stayed there, with AVOD experiencing the biggest growth of streaming services, Samsung TV data has found.

Samsung Ads Europe released its report Behind the Screens on smart TV viewer habits based on Samsung TV device data from the beginning of 2020 to H1 2021 in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy (the so-called EU5) and the US.

Although the data is only drawn from Samsung TV users, Samsung Ads said Kantar ComTech TV Data has verified its users as broadly representative of all TV users for each country researched.

Screen time among Samsung TV viewers is up across the board, the report said, as streaming viewing minutes were boosted by the pandemic and surpassed linear TV on Samsung Smart TVs for the first time in March 2020.

The UK accounted for the fewest hours of linear TV viewing and took the lead for number of streaming hours across the five major European countries included in the report.

Streaming in these European countries held 54% of total viewing time by the end of May 2021.

However, this streaming trend was briefly overturned by “the summer of sport” in June, with Wimbledon, the Euros, the Olympics and the Paralympics putting linear back on top of viewing figures.

Linear TV watching was divided in the report into light, medium and heavy linear watchers.

Samsung found most linear viewing was concentrated into the one-third of viewers that it described as heavy linear viewers.

“Heavy” was the only section whose linear viewing was more than 50% of their total Samsung TV viewing, specifically 74% of viewing time across the five European countries.

Between January 2020 and January 2021, SVOD viewing per day increased from 46 minutes to one hour and seven minutes, with growth flattening out in 2021, the report added.

In the same period, broadcast VOD (BVOD) viewing grew from 16 minutes to 22 minutes viewing per day while ad-funded VOD (AVOD) viewing of platforms like YouTube and TikTok, more than doubled from 23 minutes to 50 minutes per day.