• The increase in interest for news in general and especially live video streams drives consumption up to over five and a half hours.
• The confinement causes a surge in television consumption in the mornings

With the lockdown currently in force in Spain, most entertainment sectors have opted to provide alternatives for free entertainment at home: publishers have offered online access to their magazines, authors and artists have uploaded their content to the Internet, concerts and music festivals have been available through RRSS, there is online theatre, access to library catalogues, museums offering audiovisual content and online presentations of exhibited paintings on their websites, digital board games, video games, educational ideas… and, more specifically, in the audiovisual sector, Movistar+, Orange TV, MásMóvil and Yoigo are boosting their television content, especially for young children.

Clearly, in people’s homes, one of the main sources of leisure is the consumption of audiovisual content, whether linear or digital. And at Mediacrest, as a quality audiovisual content producer for all windows, we are interested in looking at how audiences consume in situations such as this, so we can adapt to their preferences.

We have, therefore, analysed TV consumption in the last week (9 to 15 March 2020) and compared it with the previous week (2 to 8 March 2020) and with the same period last year (11 to 17 March 2019).

How has TTV consumption changed in Spain during the first week of the Coronavirus?

Firstly, we’ll look at the main changes in linear TV consumption:

TTV CONSUMPTION: Minutes per day per individual (Linear + VOSDAL)

TV consumption (linear + on demand) up until Wednesday of this week was very similar to the previous week and the same week last year (around 3 hours 40 minutes of media per individual per day). Even on Wednesday, after the announcement of the closure of education centres in the Community of Madrid, Álava and La Rioja, average TV consumption fell; a sign that people were still unaware of the real magnitude of the pandemic and were hitting the streets enmasse, crowding into parks and onto terraces.

It was not until 12 March, when the call first went out from healthcare staff via RRSS under the hashtag #QuédateEnCasa or #YoMeQuedoEnCasa, that people began to realise what was happening and stay at home. This was what kickstarted the upturn in television consumption, which rose to notably higher levels than the other weeks analysed, reaching almost 4 hours of media per individual.
In fact, Spain’s second Trending Topic on 12 March was the hashtag #YoMeQuedoEnCasa.

As of that moment and with the closure of all education centres in the country on Friday and the subsequent announcement of the state of alarm on Saturday, unprecedented consumption levels were registered on Sunday 15 March, with an average of 5 hours 38 minutes per person per day.

The audience profile that consumes most TV comprises women and individuals over 45, who watch TV alone and mainly in the Prime Time slot (20:30 – 24:00). And although this profile, viewing habit and time slot still dominate, during this last week compared with the previous one, the main increases can be seen, above all, among audiences and time slots that are not the usual ones:

• By sex, both men and women have experienced the same increase +17%.
• The under 44s, mainly among young people between the ages of 13 and 24 who have increased their consumption by 35%, a massive rise for this audience profile, which is not a common profile for linear TV.
• The viewing habit which has grown most is in groups (+33%), in other words, accompanied by more than one person. This is logical since we are all at home together.
• And the time slot that has most increased is the morning (07:00 to 14:00), by +24%, a time when most workers would ordinarily be at their workplaces.

As regards content, the consumption of news programmes and live news has increased significantly. Now more than ever, linear TV is showing that one of its cornerstones, in a changing audiovisual panorama dominated by the appearance of new digital actors, is both its live and institutional broadcasts.

Secondly, if we look at digital consumption, understood as the interest viewers show in a programme, which translates into digital actions (likes on a programme’s fanpage, information searches or comments on specialist websites, downloads and views, etc); we can draw the following conclusions:

While the Top 3 genres were previously 1. Action and Adventure, 2. Horror and 3. Drama, this week the order has changed, and while Action and Adventure remains at the top, way ahead of the rest, now Drama has overtaken Horror. And the genres that have aroused most interest among viewers this week with respect to the other two analysed are Factual (encompassing daily and weekly informative programmes) and Variety (which primarily includes Talk Shows, After Shows, Late Night and Game Shows). Sports on the other hand have fallen, owing, logically, to the suspension of sporting competitions.

What is interesting to note and shows how an event of such magnitude conditions our consumption habits and what we decide to watch at any given moment, is the increase in views of films about pandemics similar to the one we are currently undergoing. While at the time of their release they did not have any particular relevance, now, the number of downloads of this type of film is skyrocketing.

This is the case for the film ‘Contagion’, released in 2011, about a virus similar to Covid-19 which spreads around the world while mankind searches for a cure. Thanks to the coronavirus, it is one of the most downloaded films of this period. Right now, ‘Contagion’ is the 4th most popular film on IMDb, after climbing 31 positions.

This trend can also be verified if we look at the number of searches using the Spanish for ‘Contagion film’ on Google Trends in Spain. As can be seen below, they have risen sharply in recent days.

Lastly, this situation is not just changing how audiences consume audiovisual content. Other forms of leisure and communication are also changing

• Internet consumption has shot up, especially in ‘gaming’ and Whatsapp, sparking an increase in data of almost 40% across the country since last Tuesday, according to data from Telefónica.
• Telephone calls have also experienced a 37% increase throughout Spain.

So, as you can see, here at Mediacrest we are certainly keeping a close eye on all the changes taking place in audiovisual content consumption.

ⁱSources: Kantar vía Dos30 | Parrot Analytics | Trendinalia | Betorrent