The BHC Bulletin – for March.
Well Spring has sprung – although where I live it feels more like monsoon season….welcome to the March edit of the BHC Bulletin.
This month, we are looking at changes in the broadcast content world – what I once might have called TV, but now covers so many types of content and access points.
We focus on You Tube’s next battleground, where Gen Z is watching and consuming news and bad news for Pay-TV companies.
So first – joining Netflix, Disney and your national broadcasters – You Tube sees its next “big win” as the main household tv set.
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan has laid out the platform’s next major goals as taking an even greater share of overall television viewing time and expanding its subscription business.
“YouTube’s next frontier is the living room and subscriptions,” wrote the head of the Google-owned platform in a blog post titled Letter from the YouTube CEO: 4 Big bets for 2024.
“Viewers want everything in one place, from a live sports game to the BBC to Khan Academy and Nikki Tutorials. And they’re watching YouTube the way we used to sit down together for traditional TV shows – on the biggest screen in the home with friends and family.”
The rise of YouTube as a powerhouse of living-room content consumption has been a growing talking point in recent months, with media commentator Evan Shapiro last week saying it “poses a truly existential threat” to the traditional TV ecosystem as a competitor for eyeballs.
In the UK, too, brand marketing agency Essence Mediacom recently predicted that YouTube will “leapfrog” Netflix this year in terms of viewership on big screens.
C21 Media reports more on the letter and reaction here:
For almost my entire career I’ve sat in meetings where the question has been “how do we get the next generation watch”, well recent research may point some of the way…
The next generations of consumers want to “feel a connection” with brands and creators.
News publishers should not assume young people will gravitate towards them as they get older but should act now, according to research from FT Strategies.
Researchers interviewed 45 news consumers aged between 18 and 24 in India, Nigeria and the US and identified six approaches publishers can take to attract younger audiences:
- build direct relationships with audiences “by partnering with creators, empowering editorial talent to share their stories and elevating young journalists”
- add personalised and customised experiences with filtering and algorithmic tools
- produce more social-first content
- use accessible language and less formal tones
- create content in new formats
- and make greater use of solutions journalism.
The 2023’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that 18 to 24-year-olds are going to social media rather than publisher websites for news, and the FT Strategies report said it was wrong to assume they will change their habits as they get older.
More here from Press Gazettes coverage:
Back to You Tube and Gen Alpha audiences – see what I did there, linking the top two stories…..?
Precise TV, the contextual video company, and Giraffe Insights, a kids and family research agency, have released their latest Precise Advertiser Report: Kids (PARK).
The report unpacks the media consumption habits and purchase decisions of parents and kids aged two to 12 years old, aka Generation Alpha.
The Key findings are:
- The average child aged 2-12 years old watches 106 minutes of YouTube daily.
- 95 per cent of family’s co-view and nearly 50 per cent co-view every day.
- 7 in 10 co-view when watching YouTube on CTV and more than 35 per cent watch with 2 or more people.
- Paramount has achieved high ad recall rates against popular children’s shows such as Paw Patrol and SpongeBob SquarePants.
- Kids prefer mobile and tablet gaming over console gaming – 60 per cent of kids play mobile or tablet games, with Roblox, Lego and Super Mario topping the list of mobile and tablet games that kids play.
To read more:
And finally, some sobering news for those in the Pay-TV world…
Millions in Western Europe are turning off their Pay-TV subscriptions. Western Europe will lose nearly 9 million Pay-TV subscribers between 2023 and 2029 to reach 93 million – down by 8 per cent, according to the Western Europe Pay-TV Forecasts report from analyst firm Digital TV Research. This is nowhere near as bad as the US as Pay-TV penetration will still be 53 per cent by 2029 – down from 58 per cent in 2023.
More at:
That’s it for the March BHC Bulletin – more next month. And for all your media, comms and leadership challenges, why not contact Beech Hill Consultancy to see if our insight and experience can help.
Until next time.