Youthquake: Why young people are turning off TV

Gavin Tracey is 22 and he does not have a television. When he moved out of the family home to go to college, he reckoned that anything he wanted to watch could be done on his laptop. And that has turned out to be the case.

The editor of UCD’s student newspaper, the University Observer, will view acclaimed drama series like Stranger Things on Netflix and browse the streaming site for documentaries, but most of his television-type entertainment is provided by YouTube. “You click from one thing to the next and all of a sudden five hours have gone by,” he says.

Please log in or register with Independent.ie for free access to this article.

Log In

New to Independent.ie? Create an account

RTÉ Player – the broadcaster’s video-on-demand service – rarely enters his consciousness. “Sometimes, if there’s been something big – like the Ryan family on The Late Late Show, I’ll stick it on,” he says of Ryan Tubridy’s interview with the mixed-race couple who experienced online vilification, “but the idea of sitting in front of a TV for two hours to watch the whole show doesn’t appeal to me.”

Tracey’s colleague, Aoife Mawn, the paper’s deputy editor, also does not own a television. “The only time I’d ever watch traditional TV is when I’m at home [in Leitrim] every couple of weekends,” the 21-year-old says. “I’ll look at whatever my mam is watching.”

In the normal course of her week in Dublin, she will rarely watch any conventional TV programming. “I’ll watch YouTube, clips on Twitter, stuff like that. There’s a family Netflix account but I rarely use it. I tend to watch stuff on the go – YouTube on the bus through my phone – and if I’m cooking dinner, I normally put a YouTube video on my laptop in the background.”

She, too, rarely bothers with video-on-demand, but made an exception this summer for the raunchy reality series, Love Island. “Part of it was FOMO – the fear of missing out. Everyone was talking about it, and that’s the last thing I sat down every day and watched.” She followed the fortunes of Maura, Greg et al through the Virgin Media Player on her laptop.

For 16-year-old Cal O’Driscoll, it’s all about YouTube. The Dublin schoolboy is an award-winning film-maker in his own right and eagerly awaits new content from his favourite YouTube stars, Casey Neistat and David Dobrik, who have 11 million and 14 million subscribers respectively.

“I tend to only watch Netflix at the weekend,” he says. “I’d watch a movie or try to get into a new series. I’ll sometimes look at the TV in the living room, but mostly it’s on my phone on the go.”

Scheduled broadcasting

He likes the fact that he can chose what he wants to view rather than having to pick from whatever’s on the schedule. “I couldn’t imagine it any other way.”

His sentiments – and those of Gavin Tracey and Aoife Mawn – are broadly typical of the 15-to-24 age cohort when it comes to television. And a new report commissioned by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland bears it out: quite simply, the so-called Generation Z is switching off traditional TV.

According to the report undertaken by the London-based consultancy, Mediatique, the average 15-to-24-year-old spent 70 minutes per day last year watching what’s known in the industry as ‘linear’ television – in other words, regular scheduled broadcasting. Just two years earlier, in 2016, the average time per day was 109 minutes.

Mediatique said it was “highly likely” that the lost television viewing had been replaced by online video viewing, most likely through their smartphones.

“Every analysis in recent years is showing an absolute haemorrhaging of viewers from traditional TV sets to accessing content on other devices, mobiles or laptops,” says University of Limerick broadcast journalism lecturer Fergal Quinn.

“This has happened most comprehensively with a demographic that are extremely valuable to advertisers, from 15 to late 20s and older. This has been flagged for a while but is only really kicking in properly in the last few years as mobile devices actually have the capacity that they had been promising but not quite delivering on before.”

Novelty is crucial

Quinn says this new kind of engagement is impacting on the very content that’s demanded. “Attention spans of people on mobile devices tend to be shorter, novelty is crucial, but on the plus side, the potential reach of everything is far, far greater than ever before.”

It’s a trend that is having an impact on traditional broadcasters all over the world, including RTÉ. Despite a view that their digital output is “pretty strong”, Quinn believes RTÉ is facing a huge challenge to connect with this demographic.

“For a broadcaster like RTÉ, it’s hitting relentlessly now,” he says. “There’s a smaller pool of viewers, more competing channels – both domestic and international – and an audience that is both more fussy about quality, while being less inclined to pay for it via a TV licence. The RTÉ model is much less nimble than some of its competitors and, in my opinion, there is actually not a lot more places they can cut while maintaining a decent service.”

Jane Suiter, the Director of the Institute for Future Media and Journalism (FuJo) at DCU, says broadcasters like RTÉ are facing “an existential challenge” to meet the demands of a tech-driven demographic.

“The only kind of things that people of that age group go to live [on traditional TV] are sports events – and you can see the kind of competition for the rights for those events among broadcasters. There’s huge money involved [to win the rights]. There are fewer of those big dramas like Love/Hate that everyone sits down and looks at at the same time. And with so much choice from streaming services and elsewhere, it’s no wonder that it’s become so splintered.”

Suiter says the drain away from linear TV is happening at an early age. “There’s very little money going into kids’ telly to make Irish programming,” she says. “So kids, even before they get to the age of 15, aren’t used to sitting in front of the TV watching whatever’s scheduled. They’re on YouTube or watching kids’ shows on their tablet or computers. So, for a broadcaster, getting them to return as teens when you don’t have them as children is a very difficult ask.”

It’s a task that Adrian Lynch is only too familiar with. The head of audience at RTÉ says the broadcaster is “adapting to meet their needs” and he says RTÉ Player has grown rapidly in three years.

“It’s not just a video-on-demand service,” he says. “Increasingly, it’s being seen as a broadcasting product used for live consumption and a case in point is the 296,000 streams we had for the Ireland-Russia match [in the Rugby World Cup]. And 70pc of consumption of Player is mobile [phones and tablets].”

Lynch points out that the on-the-go nature of modern life, especially for the 15-to-24 cohort, has resulted on some content being specially created for online viewing, including The Doireann Project – a comedy sketch show fronted by 2fm presenter Doireann Garrihy.

“It’s had over 100,000 views in the last eight days,” he says. “It’s been windowed first on the Player but will go to RTÉ 2 after that. And we had a documentary, This is Me, on Laura Brennan [the young HPV vaccine campaigner, who died of cancer earlier this year] and that was a really strong piece of content that was published on the Player first. It would have done maybe 90,000 streams. Then it went on RTÉ One and that had an impact on driving more people to the Player.”

‘Event TV’

While Lynch says young viewers are “watching less scheduled television, undoubtedly”, he believes certain shows still pull in large numbers of 15-to-24-year-olds in the old-fashioned way. “If you have the right content, they will come,” he says. “The Late Late Show is event TV and that regularly gets 41pc of 15 to 24s, which is big.

“Shows like Room to Improve and Dancing With the Stars get a lot of viewers in that cohort and our new series, Raised by the Village, has been getting a 31pc share of 15 to 24s.”

To clarify, both that figure and the one for The Late Late Show, is derived from live viewing and watching on demand over the following seven days.

Lynch says no broadcaster can get complacent and says he is especially pleased that increasing numbers of young viewers – “especially women” – are consuming RTÉ’s news output through the station’s Instagram feed.

There has been enormous change in broadcasting in just 10 years. Instagram came into being as recently as 2010 and streaming services have only started to take hold in the past five years.

The number will get more crowded on November 1 when Apple launches its highly anticipated service, Apple TV+. It will significantly undercut market leader Netflix on its monthly subscription price and comes free for a year to anyone who purchases a new Apple product.

Unlimited choice

But is unlimited choice really what consumers want? Ellen Kelliher, head of video at the Dublin agency, Core, is not so sure. “We’re seeing subscription fatigue now,” she says. “The available content is so fragmented now. There are so many streaming services now and it can feel a bit overwhelming, not to mention expensive.”

Kelliher believes the pressure for the likes of Netflix to keep producing huge volumes of new, high-end content will lead to it carrying advertising. “We may see a hybrid-subscription model where there’s a lower cost to subscribe, if ads are in the equation.”

Despite the huge shift in our viewing habits, especially among ‘Gen Zers’, UL’s Fergal Quinn believes RTÉ will still play a sizeable part, irrespective of how many streaming giants enter the picture.

“The streaming market is going to be quite over-populated soon,” he says, “so I think it is more a question of maintaining what RTÉ are actually good at and finding ‘ins’ with some of these streaming companies – such as selling them some of the content that it would not be cost effective for Apple to produce themselves.

“The more localised content is most valuable in that regard – generic content is easily replicated. Stuff like Nationwide isn’t, and you’d be surprised the audience that finds.”

Rachel Farrell: ‘Netflix and YouTube are all young people need’

Last week, I landed at my family home to find my dad trying to set up my 18-year-old sister’s new smart TV. While dad was faffing about with the channels, shouting at mam to dig out a satellite, my sister said she wouldn’t need any – Netflix and YouTube would suffice.

It came as a surprise to my parents, who figured she’d at least want RTÉ One and Two “for the news”, but it barely made me raise an eye. It’s no surprise that young people are turning away from Irish television when they’re catering for a completely different audience.

There are many reasons why streaming sites like Netflix are more appealing to my generation – it’s mostly down to the fact that it’s accessible anywhere, any time. For a lot of people in their 20s, already struggling to find a house with decent rent, buying a TV is the last thing on their minds when they have a laptop or phone.

Many of us work long days and have busy schedules. With online streaming sites, you can watch a big-budget series at any time of the day, from your bedroom or on the bus. In the meantime, Irish channels are rehashing old ideas on their players to try and bring young people in – and it doesn’t seem to be working.

Take for example RTÉ’s reboot of The Podge and Rodge Show, a hit among the likes of my parents a decade ago. The series was brought back last year with social media star Doireann Garrihy at the helm, no doubt to try to bring in her 200,000 Instagram followers.

But it was cancelled after the first season, with a viewership of 99,400, no match for the 400,000 it brought in back in the day.

If Irish TV channels want to draw in a younger audience, they should look at the demographics of what they’re watching: reality shows like Love Island are obviously a massive hit, as well as thought-provoking dramas and edge-of-your-seat crime documentaries.

There’s a reason why Channel 4’s Derry Girls was such a hit among millennials, with a whopping 1.8 million people tuning into the series two premiere.

It was relatable, humorous and easygoing – and I think Irish channels could take a leaf out of Channel 4’s book.

Source: Read Full Article