A short report on audience behaviour
March 2013
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acma | 1
Contents (Continued)
Introduction
How did Australians follow the London 2012 Olympic Games?
Monitoring the games—TV viewing of London 2012
What did Australia watch in 2012?
Too much sport is never enough
Fewer younger Australians watched the London 2012 on TV
Scheduled television coverage still popular
Using the best screen
Fanning the Olympic flame—Aussies, social media and London 2012
Streaming the games
Use of devices to follow the Games
Catch-up or recorded TV
‘Liking’ the games
Tweeting for gold
Conclusion
acma | 1Introduction
In September and October 2012, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (the ACMA) published three articles examining how Australians followed the London 2012 Olympic Games, held between 27 July and 12 August 2012.
Interest in the Games was high—the first ‘social and mobile Olympics’—as many commentators noted.
Major televised events, like the Olympics, give media researchers the opportunity to look at audience behaviour in depth and compare this with previous events.
Past Olympics have attracted a large number of television viewers, and London 2012 was no exception. However, in 2012, many Australians also embraced social, mobile and online media to follow the Olympics, taking advantage of opportunities that were not available when the last Games were held in Beijing in 2008.
This paper looks at how Australians followed the London 2012 Olympic Games and some of the changes that have taken place in audiences and viewing patterns.
How did Australians follow the London 2012 Olympic Games?
The London 2012 Olympic Games have been called the first-ever ‘social and mobile Olympics’, but how did Australians choose to follow their favourite events and athletes?
In September and October 2012, the ACMA published a series of short research articles on how Australian audiences accessed content from the London 2012 Olympic Games. As the regulator of broadcasting, internet, radiocommunications and telecommunications, the ACMA keeps informed about trends across media and communications, including changes in consumer attitudes and behaviour.
Past Olympics have attracted a large number of television viewers, and London 2012 was no exception. The Australian estimated that an average 2.5 million Australians watched the Games each night on free-to-air and subscription television. With Twitter, Facebook and smartphones now mainstream, many Australians also embraced social, mobile and online media to follow the Games, taking advantage of opportunities that were not available for Beijing 2008.
Questions this research attempted to explore included:
Does a major event, such as London 2012, pull audiences back to more traditional platforms or encourage people to watch events and keep informed about results using other channels?
How is social media affecting how audiences follow a major sporting event? What kinds of media engagement do social networks promote and does social media supplement or complement traditional TV viewing and media use?
Do broadly popular events such as the London 2012 have the potential to encouragepeople to participate online?
The next section focuses on how Australians watched London 2012 on television. The finalsection covers online, mobile and social media engagement.
Monitoring the Games—TV viewing of London 2012
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) estimated that the audience for the London 2012 across more than 200 countries was 4.8 billion people.[1] As the IOC noted, when the Olympic Games were last held in London in 1948, it was the first time that television coverage had been broadcast into people’s homes, with approximately 500,000 viewers—mostly within a 100-kilometre radius of the city—watching the 64 hours of coverage.
The first Games held in the southern hemisphere—in Melbourne in 1956—coincided with the introduction of public television broadcasts in Australia.[2]These Games were also the first where the organising committee asked the international broadcast community to pay rights fee for access to the television feed. Major European and North American broadcasters refused to pay and as a result, the Games were effectively only televised in Australia.[3]
At the time, it was estimated that there were only 5,000 television sets in Australia.[4]
There have been considerable changes since then.
What did Australia watch in 2012?
More than 13.5 million Australians watched Channel Nine’s coverage of London 2012 Olympic Games, although the 18 to 34 age group had fewer viewers follow the Games on television compared with other groups.
Nine Network’s coverage of London 2012 reached over 900,000 more viewers than the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and more than a million more than the 2004 Athens Games.[5] Nevertheless, themost popular London 2012 broadcast (London Live, day two, early evening) reached a smaller combined audience (just over three million) than the topAustralian sporting events televised live in 2012. For example, the 2012 Australian Football League Grand Final had a combined audience of 4.19 million, and the third State of Origin rugby league match between Queensland and New South Wales reached a combined audience of just over four million.[6]
Despite a lower-than-expected medal haul in the pool, swimming was the most popular event with Australian Olympic audiences, featuring in the top five most-watched programs on Nine. The opening ceremony also attracted a large number of viewers—an average audience of 1.8 million over four hours in the five city metropolitan markets.
Table 1 Top London 2012 programs on Channel Nine in the five metropolitan city markets—average audienceRank / Program / What was on? / Average audience (total individuals)
1 / London Live day two early evening 6.30pm–8.30pm AEST / Swimming heats, men’s hockey / 2,142,000
2 / London Live day one early evening 6.30pm–8.30pm AEST / Swimming heats, men’s cycling, road race, rowing / 1,970,000
3 / London Live day two evening 8.30pm–10.30pm AEST / Swimming heats, rowing, women’s cycling, road race, Boomers basketball / 1,924,000
4 / London Live day three early evening 6.30pm–8.30pm AEST / Swimming heats, rowing, women’s hockey / 1,828,000
5 / London Live day one evening 8.30pm–10.30pm AEST / Swimming heats, men’s cycling, road race / 1,807,000
7 / London Live opening ceremony 5.30am–10am AEST / Opening ceremony / 1,801,000
Source: OzTAM
Note: Audiences for simulcast programming on Gem was attributed to Nine.
Too much sport is never enough
Even after the swimming finished, Australian audiences continued to watch Nine’s coverage of London 2012 in large numbers. The average daily audiences for its prime-time coverage remained relatively consistent into the second week of competition. Traditionally, Australian audience numbers have tended to decline after the first week.
Figure 1 Average daily audiences for Channel Nine’s prime-time coverage of London 2012Source: OzTAM.Notes: Early evening programs broadcast from 6.30 pm–8.30 pm AEST time. Evening programs were broadcast from 8.30 pm–10.30 pm AEST time.
Across the 16 days of competition, an average of 1,628,750 viewers watched Nine’s early evening coverage in the five city metropolitan markets. An average of 1,596,375 watched the evening session. Foxtel’s simultaneous programming across eight dedicated channels averaged 538,170 viewers during prime time.[7] This means the average audience for London 2012 across free-to-air and subscription television in the five city metropolitan markets was around 2,150,733 between 6.30 pm and 10.30pm.
Fewer younger Australians watched the London 2012 on TV
Fewer Australians aged 18 to 34 tuned in to watch Nine’s coverage of the London 2012 than those aged 35 and over. The coverage of the opening ceremonyis a good example of these differences.
Figure 2 The opening ceremony on Channel Nine—average daily reach percentage, by ageSource: OzTAM.
This behaviour was repeated across other Games programming.
A multinational online survey conducted prior to the London 2012 by Research Now found that 16 to 34-year-olds were the audience most likely to engage with the Games via news websites and social media, and the least likely to watch the events on television. The survey included 7,200 respondents across six countries including Australia (1,200), the UK, US, Canada, France and Germany.[8]
Scheduled television coverage still popular
About 217 million people in the US watched NBCUniversal’s broadcasts of London 2012. In the UK, the BBC’s coverage reached 51.9 million viewers.[9]
In Australia,over 13.5 million viewers watched Nine Network’s coverage of the Games. Foxtel’s eight-channel coverage attracted more than one million Australians on some nights.[10]
Overall, 81 per cent of the Australian population watched scheduled coverage of London 2012, compared with 80 per cent in the US and 89 per cent in the UK (see Figure 3).
Figure 3Proportion of population who watched scheduled TV coverage of London 2012 and/or Paralympic Games at least once a weekSource: Ofcom Communications market report 2012:
Sample sizes: UK = 1,065, USA = 1,010, Australia = 1,007.
According to Ofcom research, the most common reasons given for watching the London 2012 on free-to-airtelevision were convenience or quality. A higher proportion of people watched the Games on television than on any other medium.[11]
Using the best screen
While there has been a major growth in the adoption of smartphones and tablets in the last five years, and PCs and laptops can be found in many homes, the television screen remains a dominant feature in almost all Australian households.
In the four years between the Beijing and London Olympic Games, over nine million flat-panel digital television sets were sold in Australia. During the same period, the average retail price paid fell from over $1,600 to under $800. By the time the London Games started on 27 July 2012, most Australian homes had a high-definition, flat-panel digital television set to watch the coverage on.
Figure 4Retail sales of high-definition,flat-panel digital television sets, 2008–12Source: GfK Retail and Technology, retail sales data for high-definition LCD and plasma television sets with digital tuner,
September 2008–July 2012.
As indicated by other research, audiences tend to watch major events on the best screen available The London Olympics were no exception, although audience behaviour has changed in other ways, as the next section explores.
Fanning the Olympic flame—Aussies, social media and London 2012
How did social media and online viewing change the way Australians followed the Games?
The answer to this question is both ‘not much’—as more people watched traditional broadcast coverage than for previous Games—and ‘in every way’—with many more people using social media to follow and comment on these Games than previous Olympics.
Streaming the Games
The time difference meant most Australians watched events held earlier in the day (UK time) on TV rather than streaming this content. Nevertheless, The Financial Review reported that more than 135,000 people downloaded the Foxtel app. Many of these were not Foxtel subscribersand would have only been able to access medal tallies, results and Foxtel’s programming schedule.
By the end of the first week of the Games, there were more than 190,000 video streams per day using the app. Of these, only about 15,500 of these were catch up—meaning quite a few late nights for Australian viewers. Nine also launched an app (Jump-In) to encourage social media engagement.
Short-form video footage delivered online was heavily utilised given the timezone difference. Nine’s dedicated Olympic website on the Ninemsn Wide World of Sports portal averaged over 350,000 stream starts per day, with 6,159,179 total cumulative stream views across the 17 days of competition.The largest volume of streams in a single day—754,890—was generated the day after Australia won three gold medals (Sally Pearson (track), Anna Meares(cycling) and Nathan Outteridge and Iain Jensen (men’s 49er class sailing) on Wednesday 8August.
Nine’s audience research during the Games suggested people watched on different devices at different times.Hence,there were three ‘prime times’. While television screens continued to predominate in the early evening, late evening (after 10.30pm) saw mobile phones and tablets being utilised at similar levels to the television. Mobile phones were heavily utilised during the morning commute and lunchtime, and PCs and laptops were most used at lunchtime.
Device mobility allowed additional Olympic consumption. In-home consumption via television sets averaged3h:11m per day, in-home via any device was 3h:50m per day, and within and out-of-home on any device was 6h:38m, adding an additional 3h:27m toviewing content beyond the television screen.
Use of devices to follow the Games
Tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices were important ways to follow, share and stream Olympics content, with Google reporting a 10-fold increase in mobile searches globally. Australia was similar to other countries. Here, 45 per cent of all Olympics-related searches were done on mobiles. This figure was 47 per cent in the US and 46 per cent in the UK.
Much of this was multi-screen behaviour.
As Google observed, there is an increase in the use of mobile searches ‘ … in many multi-screen events (such as the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and Eurovision Song Contest) but the Olympics represents an even more pronounced trend and one [that is happening] at a global level’.[12]
Engagement increased for those who used more than one screen. Nine’s research found that 48 per cent of those people who viewed the Olympics on television in the preceding 24-hour period used a second screen at the same time. Just over half of these were using the second screen for tasks unrelated to what they were watching. However, the remainder were accessing Games content as they viewed. These ‘cross-screeners’ spent twice as much time following the Games as those who watched on one screen.[13]
Typically, the PC and mobile devices were used for short-form content, while larger screens for were used when the best screen mattered. Twenty-two per cent of the population was estimated by Nine to have dual-screened related content. Television and PCs (or tablets or other mobile devices) can be seen as both a companion and competitor.
Tablets and mobile devices can enhance the television broadcast, allowing viewers to access additional content, statistics and further information on what they are watching. However, these devices can also detract and compete against television consumption, particularly for highlights, and non-live, non-exclusive footage.
In a survey conducted before the Olympics by the UK media regulator (Ofcom), one in five Britons said they intended to follow the Games online, whether through a PC (12 per cent), tablet (six per cent), or mobile phone (eight per cent). Young people were more likely to say they were planning to follow the Games online (32 per cent of 16 to24-year-olds).
What people said they would do to follow the Games, and what they did do were different.More than half (52 per cent) of the UK audience used a PC at least once a week to follow the Games (52 per cent in the US and49 per cent in Australia) and 29 per cent of Britons used a mobile phone (21 per cent in the US and 18 per cent in Australia). Twenty-one per cent followed the Games using a tablet (19 per cent in the US and 16 per cent in Australia).
Figure 5 Ofcom—Most common means of accessing Olympics/Paralympics coverageSource: Ofcom: Communications market report 2012
Sample sizes: UK = 1,065, USA = 1,010, Australia = 1,007.
While scheduled television was the most common way of following the 2012 London Olympics, research during the Games[14] found 90 per cent of the UK population followed the Games using a combination of TV, PC, mobile, tablet and social media:
21.9 million viewers accessed additional streams during the Games using interactive TV and online
8.8 million people watched on-demand footage across TV, PC and mobile platforms