With any luck Christmas Day heralds a hearty meal with friends and/or family, but then what? For a great many people, the answer is to watch television. As with any occasion where large numbers of people might watch together, we are interested to know just what they will watch.
Is it perennial favourites? Or is the nation switching over to newer options from pure-play VOD or video-sharing services?
Over the last three Christmas Days (when Barb has included pure-play VOD and video-sharing services alongside measurement of broadcasters) the most watched content item has been the monarch’s address to the nation at 3pm. The audience for the late Queen in 2021 was 7.5m. King Charles pulled in 8.4m for his first address in 2022 and nearly 6m last year. A downward trend he would no doubt like to arrest. Over these years, only in 2022 would a pure-play VOD programme have made the top 50 most viewed programmes. That was the whodunit Glass Onion A Knives Out Mystery, starring Daniel Craig, in 2022 with an audience of 1.3m. This would have ranked it as the 24th most-watched programme. As ever we need to consider YouTube. This is complicated by the lack of content measurement for YouTube. We can break down the YouTube audience into hourly slots to allow for a degree of comparison. In 2023 the 5 pm TV-set audience of 1.1m would have ranked as the 28th most watched programme on Christmas Day. However, this ignores the fact that viewers could have been watching anything at all from the entirety of YouTube. It is overwhelmingly likely that these 1.1m viewers are spread over thousands of different content items.
So, is it fair then to say that, on Christmas Day at least, the nation flocks back to familiar favourites from long-established services? Up to a point. The programmes consistently achieving large Christmas Day audiences are the likes of Strictly Come Dancing on BBC One, The 1% Club on ITV 1, or even Home Alone (1990) on Channel 4 — proving new content is not a prerequisite for large audiences. These programmes achieved audiences of between 1.5m and 5.4m in 2023.
However, big audiences on the main channels are masking audience fragmentation. If we consider programmes with audiences over 1 million on Christmas Day itself the average for the last ten years is for 45 shows to pass this mark. Aside from Covid 19 lockdown impacted 2020, that figure was last surpassed in 2017. There is clearly a trend for fewer shows to gather an audience in excess of 1m. This enhances the importance of the remaining big shows but also makes the planning and buying of Christmas TV ad campaigns more difficult.
Large concentrations of audience numbers are proving harder to find at Christmas
We can also consider how people view on different services throughout the day. Might this show that there are certain times of day that are ‘owned’ by the newer services? The overall picture shows that this is not so. On Christmas Day, time with broadcasters outstrips pure-play VOD and video sharing services across the day.
A final challenge is often to consider younger audiences. Even when we look in this way, we still see that 16-34s (and the picture is the same for 16-24s, or children) spend most of their Christmas Day TV-set time with broadcaster content.
Coveted 16-34s spend Christmas Day with broadcaster content
The landscape is shifting. There is fragmentation. There is more time with non-broadcaster services and the time with those services is growing. But for now, at Christmas at least, well-established sources are the go-to.
Come Boxing Day we’ll be able to see if this still held true for 2024.
Featured image: joshua herrera / Unsplash