This morning Ofcom published it’s Media Nations 2020 - Northern Ireland Report. Here’s a rundown of the key findings:
There was a significant increase in broadcast TV viewing during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. People in Northern Ireland spent an average of 4 hours and 53 minutes per day watching something on the TV screen at the height of the lockdown in April 2020, a 69-minute increase on the figure for 2019.
BBC services were the most-used services for news about Covid-19 during the early stages of the lockdown. More than eight in ten (83%) online respondents in Northern Ireland used BBC services during the first four weeks of the lockdown period.
Paid-for satellite and cable television services from Sky and Virgin Media are present in just under half of homes in Northern Ireland (44%).
At the beginning of 2020, some 62% of homes had some way of connecting their TV to the internet, through a smart TV or other device such as a streaming stick.
More than half of households in Northern Ireland (56%) have a subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) service from companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Now TV.
Netflix is the most popular, present in nearly half of homes (56%) while Amazon Prime Video is present in around a quarter of homes (28%).
The BBC iPlayer is the most popular broadcast video-on-demand (BVoD) player in Northern Ireland. It is watched in just under a third of homes (30%), followed by the ITV Hub (21%), All4 (18%) and My5 (14%).
People in Northern Ireland continue to watch less broadcast TV than in any other UK nation, on average. People in Northern Ireland spent 2 hours 54 minutes watching broadcast television in 2019; an 11-minute (5.8%) decline from 3 hours 5 minutes in 2018.
For the second consecutive year, Derry Girls was the most-watched programme in Northern Ireland.
UTV and BBC One are the most-used sources for people looking for news about Northern Ireland.
There was an 18% increase in spending on first-run content for viewers in Northern Ireland in 2019. Of this £32.9m spend, the majority went towards non-news/non-current affairs programming, at £13.2m, up by 16% since the previous year. The increase in spend on other genres ends the steady decline seen over recent years.
Current affairs had the largest relative increase in first-run spend, increasing by 48% on the previous year to a record high of £8.6m.
Overall, news content dominates the BBC’s output for Northern Ireland, comprising over half (54%) of first-run hours.
UTV’s hours of first-run content for Northern Ireland have remained stable since 2016, with 355 hours of programme output in 2019.
Nine in ten adults in Northern Ireland tune in to live radio every week, on average, for more than 19 hours a week.
Local stations – Cool FM, Downtown, Downtown Country, U105, the Q Network and Radio Ulster/Foyle – account for 59% of listening in Northern Ireland, far higher than their counterpart stations in Scotland and Wales.
Radio is a popular news platform, with four in ten adults using it to access news about their nation, higher than the use of radio for news in Scotland or Wales.
Digital listening (over DAB and online) continues to grow, rising 3.5pp to 43% (Q1, 2020) but remains significantly below the other UK nations.
About one in five homes in Northern Ireland had smart speakers at the beginning of 2020 (21%). The most popular use of smart speakers among users in NI was to listen to a live radio station (67%).