You’ve reached the end of a long day, and all you want to do is chill out. You sink into the sofa, reach for the remote… and then what? How do you choose what to watch on TV?
Understanding TV choice in a complex landscape
“I feel like it must have been easier in the past because now I go from iPlayer to Netflix to Now TV just scrolling the whole time”
Female, 27
Do you head to Netflix to see what’s trending? Revisit a classic boxset on All 4? Or maybe (*gasp*) do a bit of channel surfing and see what you can catch live?
Perhaps you get even more creative: tuning-in to watch a Dark Souls Twitch stream live on your smart TV, picking through a YouTube series about fermented food, or maybe (*shhh*) cracking out that dusty hard-drive and watching an old film you may-or-may-not have downloaded illegally a few months back…
It’s an understatement to say that today’s content choices are myriad and complex. And – as a result – it’s not uncommon to hear floating from a living room on any given evening ‘what shall we watch tonight?’
Helping brands understand what viewers want to watch
As a consumer insights agency, that’s something that we at Hook wanted to investigate – we wanted to better understand how young people today were choosing content.
In particular, we wanted to explore when and how audiences were turning to NEW TV shows. It’s a common trope in the TV space that audiences would often rather turn to an old episode of Friends than the latest HBO blockbuster, and we wanted to find out how brands could deliver better new content experiences in on-demand spaces.
So we did a little digging, and found a few key rules that today’s media-savvy consumers want brands to think about when delivering them:
3 Rules for encouraging audiences to watch new TV content
- Enable Safe Discovery – Create a calm, controlled, and curated environment for viewers
- Validate Worthiness – Time is precious for younger audiences, and they need assurances that the ‘risk’ of investing time into this programme will be worth it
- Embrace Tasters – Samples aren’t just for ice-cream counters: chunkable content can provide a safe space for trialling shows
But this is only the beginning of what we found… want to hear a little more? Get in touch to request your free copy of our research! Or you have any particular questions, we’re only an email away!
