Heather Coghill Reveals Surprising TV Trends From Comcast Viewership Data

But in a media market that offers a choice of many television performance reports why release another one now quotWhen we first analyzed our viewership data we saw that it was uncovering new insights which we publicized internallyquot Coghill explained quotWe shared those insights with our clients Now we want to release the results to a wider audiencequot Indeed the insights gleaned from the viewership data dispels many myths regarding consumer preferences and gives greater clarity to both advertisers and programmers on consumer behaviorsThe DataThe report culls insights from viewership across more than 17 million Comcast households across 65 markets This is quotbased on approximately nine billion hours of viewing data captured in Q1 2019 To put that number in perspective it would take over 100000 years to watch one billion hours of contentquot Coghill saidAll of this data is managed by an analytics team quotWe have data scientists and people who are used to working with big data and they cultivated it for usquotFor Coghill time spent per day is an important metric that the study surfaced quotThe press reports that TV is dying but in fact people are spending a lot of time with TV daily amp8212 over six hours amp8212 and it was up year over yearquot The data shows that quotTV is as strong as everquot she said It39s also evolvingA New Television LandscapequotTV viewing has changedquot Coghill stated quotIt39s not just about watching the four broadcast networks in primetime anymore We found that 68 percent of time spent with linear TV is spent outside of primetime The sheer number of networks that households are watching total over 34 per month And the networks vary by household with cable networks accounting for 65 percent of all viewingquotThe number of networks viewed per month surprised Coghill and is higher than other analyses that are based on much smaller samples quotIf you just took the mostwatched network across all of our households it is 308 different networksquot she added which means that quotit39s getting harder and harder for advertisers to reach audiences at scalequot For Coghill all of this speaks to the degree of fragmentation quotwhich we knew to be true but I was surprised as to how much fragmentation there actually isquotThe report found that primetime is not necessarily the highest viewing daypart Sunday is not necessarily the highest viewing day of the week and the share of live and timeshifted viewing remained constant throughout the week These insights hold great implications for programmers schedulers marketers and advertisersAccording to the report results there was a significant uptick in viewing 1Q18 to 1Q19 with viewing on cable networks and video on demand VOD driving a large part of this growth Notably VOD viewership in Comcast39s footprint has doubled since 2016Local Market InsightsquotThe data insights become especially valuable when you look at the localmarket level especially when you get into niche audience segmentsquot because of the ample sample size that the Comcast data offers Coghill pointed out quotWe can look across tens of thousands of households in many marketsquotCoghill found that there were fairly consistent viewing patterns across markets for example the number of networks watched on a marketbymarket level ranged from 30 to 37 and the amount of time viewing outside of prime ranged from 66 percent to 70 percentIn comparing yeartoyear trends Coghill explained that quotwhile the bigpicture trends remain consistent across markets there are definitely some nuances amp8212 households in Pittsburgh spend six hours 27 minutes with live linear television daily while households in Salt Lake City spend four hours 41 minutes with live linear television daily Households in Sacramento spend one hour eight minutes with timeshifted viewing daily DVRVOD while households in Miami only spend 35 minutes a day When we get into the networklevel viewing these differences become even more apparentquotStay TunedWith all of this available viewership data there will be added analyses in future reports quotWe are going to take a deeper look at viewing by market and by audience segments in an upcoming editionquot Coghill shared quotand these reports will come out quarterly going forwardquotClick the social buttons to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Heather Coghill Reveals Surprising TV Trends From Comcast Viewership Data

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Charlene Weisler

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Heather Coghill Reveals Surprising TV Trends From Comcast Viewership Data

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Charlene Weisler

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