TORONTO – The distribution of Canadian documentaries on broadcaster portals is only slightly disrupting traditional audience consumption patterns, according to new research conducted by the Documentary Organization of Canada / Association des documentaristes du Canada (DOC).
The organization’s first Digital Distribution Report, released Thursday, establishes benchmarks for the on-line distribution of Canadian documentaries, charts how they perform on iTunes, plus tracks how many views NFB.ca receives worldwide and the number of views they draw on mobile devices with their apps.
While more Canadians are accessing documentaries on digital platforms, the viewership of individual titles is in stark contrast with the performance of the most popular documentaries. The average viewership of a popular feature documentary on a broadcaster portal is 8,000 views over the course of a year, while on television it draws around 900,000 viewers.
"One of the goals with this report was to find out whether actual viewing numbers justify the recent hype around online distribution of documentaries”, said DOC chair Katie McKenna, in the report’s press release. “What we found was that online consumption is still a tiny fraction of the audience numbers documentaries reach on television. Multi-platform distribution is a welcome trend and holds enormous potential for our community — but if Canadians prefer to watch their documentaries on television, our regulators and broadcasters need to make sure they're still available there."
Other highlights from the report include:
– The top viewed episode of a documentary series garners almost 60,000 views over the course of a year;
– On Rogers On Demand Online, total documentary viewership exceeded 28,000 total requested views over a 10-month period;
– The average viewership of the most popular English documentary titles on NFB.ca is 64,702 views (worldwide) over the course of a year, and 37,226 views for French (worldwide); and
– The average viewership of the top 5 English titles on the NFB’s mobile applications is 12,556 views a year (worldwide), and 4,372 French (worldwide).
