We create our hot topic audience report at the end of every TV season so that our clients have quick and easy access to the TV viewing trends in Canada.
The seasonality of TV viewing plays a critical role in programming and media planning and buying. In particular, fall remains a key period for the TV industry, as this is when many new and returning shows start. How well the shows perform during this time period determines whether they’ll return in the spring.
Viewing figures for this year have obviously been impacted extensively by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the beginning of the lockdown period we saw viewing increase, viewing to news stations grew significantly and by contrast viewing to sports stations fell with the lack of live content. As the summer progressed viewing dipped as the appetite for news decreased and the spring season shows came to an end. However once live sport returned in August we saw the viewing levels begin to rise.
Our report covers:
- Average time spent watching TV by season.
- Share of viewing trends by station groups (ie conventional vs specialty TV).
- Top performing TV stations including AMA (000s) and share of viewing.
- Top performing TV programs including ratings and percentage of live viewing.
Clients with a TV PPM subscription can access this report either through the Lens platform or from the homepage of InfoSys+TV PPM.
Highlights for the summer 2020 TV season include:
- Total hours viewed for Ind2+ in Canada was down slightly vs last summer. However this situation differs by market with Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver markets all seeing a slight increase in hours viewed for this demo.
- Share of viewing to US specialty stations for Ind2+ in Canada grew from 8.7% to 11.5% year on year driven by increased viewing to CNN whose audience has almost doubled vs last summer.
- Ind2+ in Quebec continue to watch 5+ hours more TV per week than English Canada.
- There has been no change to the ranking of Quebec Franco conventional stations; TVA continues to dominate with 23% share of Ind2+ viewing in the Quebec Franco market.
- Sportsnet National tops the list of most watched Canadian specialty stations in Canada thanks to the return of live sport at the beginning of August.
- Big Brother is top of the Adult 25-54 program rankings for Total Canada but again the top program differs by market. Global News comes out top in Vancouver whereas America’s got Talent is top in Toronto and Infoman in Montreal Franco.
This report is created using ConexAPI. This tool accesses Numeris TV PPM data directly and feeds it seamlessly into data visualization tools, such as Excel or Microsoft PowerBI. This allows you to spend far less time creating reports and more time finding the insights you need and acting on them.
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Other blog posts that may be of interest:
TV advertising during COVID-19
Impact of COVID-19 on TV tuning
