OTTAWA – More screens and more content sources means that Canadian-made content must be both easily available and easy to find for it to succeed in a competitive local and global market. But according to new research from the Media Technology Monitor (MTM), just over a third of all Canadians say that finding new TV content they want to watch is easy.
This past year, the MTM worked with a consortium of researchers at the Canadian Media Fund (CMF), the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Telefilm Canada as it asked Canadians about how they discover TV content. The result is a new report entitled Discoverability: How Canadians Find TV Content that provides an overview of how Canadians are finding and accessing television content.
According to the report, Canadians are still as interested in television as they were a decade ago, with 96% reporting that they have watched TV in the past month either online or live on a regular TV set. Linear TV is still by far the primary way that people watch TV, but time spent watching online TV has doubled in the past three years, with some 56% of Canadians now watching TV online and four in 10 tuning in to an OTT service like Netflix.
Other highlights from the report include:
– On average, Canadians use three different methods to discover new TV content, with word of mouth and paid advertising on TV and radio the primary means;
– Millennials are more likely to rely on earned media such as recommendations from friends and social media when finding TV content. Boomers and Francophones are more likely to rely on paid media like commercials and trailers when finding new shows;
– Anglophones find discovering new shows more difficult than Francophones;
– Women use commercials more often while men are more likely to channel surf or read reviewer sites; and
– Internet TV viewers and those who watch a lot of live TV find discovering new content easier than the average Canadian.
MTM is a research product of CBC/Radio Canada.
