Millennials Watching TV Habit - Survey Report

Today audience media habit is dramatically shifting from conventional media towards new media. The rapid adoption of digital media enables us to access any kind of information, from news to entertainment. However, this condition tends to lead the millennials for no longer accessing television as before. Jakpat conducted a survey to understand this phenomenon by asking 303 respondents in nationwide.

First of all, we asked about their frequency of watching TV in a day. We assumed that they were no longer watching TV as much as they did. It turns out that our assumption were right. Millennials frequency of watching TV in a day was only about 1-2 hours (24%) and 2-3 hours (23%). Unlike the previous generations, they do not spend their times all day long in front of TV.

Understanding their reason of no longer watching TV as much as their previous generations, most respondents consider that TV programs are not interesting. They do not have any particular favourite program to be watched. Other respondents said that they were busy; therefore they do not watch TV. The lack of time makes them impossible to spend their leisure times in front of TV. At last, the least respondents said that they do not watch TV because they do not have one. However, this finding can give us a bigger picture that despite their abilities to own a TV device, some millennials even choose of not having TV device at all.

Years ago, cable TV programs may only be watched in certain places. However, the phenomenon is no longer the same. Various providers and affordable packages of cable TV enable anyone have the ability to watch the programs almost in everywhere. We asked our respondents about their preferences toward national and cable TV. We found out that although there is a persistent growth on the number of cable TV subscribers, Indonesian millennials still prefer national TV than cable TV. However, the main reason of their preference is because they do not subscribe to any cable TV. Therefore, it is not about the quality of cable TV programs nor the packages offered by providers that become the main obstacle. This finding is also strengthening by the answer from respondents who subscribed the cable TV because they offer more interesting programs.

Talking about cable TV, we asked our respondents about their cable TV provider. The rough competition among providers can easily be seen during the last five years by calculating the number of the players in this industry. Our survey shows that the most used cable TV providers are First Media (28%), Indovision (26%), Telkomvision (15%), IndiHome (13%), OrangTV (12%), and BigTV (6%).

Although in general we could not find any specific favourite TV program by millennials, we found the favourite type of TV programs by gender. Different gender has different taste in watching TV programs. They have different kind of preferences toward TV program that they would love to see. Men tend to love movie, news, and documentary program. In other hand, women tend to love movie, talk show, and soap opera.

Different pattern of activities among millennials and other generations lead us to the question; do their prime time of watching TV is just the same as ordinary people? We found out that the answer is true. Indonesian millennials prime time of watching TV is just the same as other generations. Millennials are mostly watching TV programs at 5-10 pm.

However, men and women once again have a different preference about time of watching TV. Men are more often watching TV at midnight, while women are more often watching TV at lunch time.

Interestingly, although men and women have different favourite times to watch TV, both of them love to watch it on the weekend.

We asked about their companion during watching TV. Two main findings in this survey is quite interesting. A group of respondents prefer to watch TV with family (48%), while other group prefer to watch it alone (40%). Therefore, we could not make a general assumption regarding millennials preferences of companion during watching TV programs.

At last, we also asked our respondents regarding their attitude towards commercial breaks. Just as we have predicted, 66% of millennials said that they like to zap the channel during commercial breaks. Therefore, it would be an important consideration for advertising media planner to decide whether placing advertisement in TV to target millennials segment is a wise decision or not.

For more detail you can download XLS report at the button below. JAKPAT report consists of 3 parts which are 1) Respondent Profile, 2) Crosstabulation for each question and 3) Raw Data. Respondent profile shows you demographic profiles ( gender,age range, location by province, and monthly spending). Cross tabulation enables you to define different demographic segment preference on each answer.