While 2020 was the year of the streaming binge, it seems we also developed an insatiable appetite for catch up TV during lockdown.

Australia’s latest TV viewing figures are in and it turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that not even being cooped up at home for months was enough to convince us to watch a lot more live television. Obviously the dearth of live sport didn’t help.

More than half of us own personal video recorders, like a Fetch TV or Foxtel iQ4, so we can record live television and watch it when it suits us, all the while fast-forwarding through the ad breaks.

You’d think a PVR would be the perfect lockdown companion, but the amount of recorded television we watched last year barely rose compared to the year before. Instead, we turned to the internet to keep us entertained.

The impact of streaming on our viewing habits is undeniable, with all the major subscription services signing up plenty of new customers in 2020, according to Roy Morgan research. Netflix alone added a million new Australians subscribers in just the three months to May 2020, helping us get through a long winter. In that same period of time Stan (owned by Nine, which also owns this masthead) added 729,000 Australian subscribers, and Disney+ added 689,000.

But there was also good news for Australia’s traditional television networks. Broadcast video on demand — the broadcasters’ free catch up TV services — received a massive shot in the arm during lockdown.

Loading

Our appetite for catch up leapt 40 per cent in 2020 as we turned to iView, SBS on Demand, 7plus, 9Now, 10 All Access and Foxtel Go for entertainment. We mostly watched them on smart TVs, rather than computers, smartphones or tablets.

All of that actually bodes well for the future of traditional television. It’s not that we don’t want to watch free-to-air shows. And it’s not that we don’t want to watch them on the big screen in the lounge room. It’s just that we don’t necessarily want to watch them live as much.