YouTube, TikTok Eroding Viewing Time Spent Streaming TV & Movies

Note: This article relates to the July 2024 VIP+ special report “The Race to Replace TV,” available to subscribers only.

While linear TV has lost watch time to on-demand streaming, rising video consumption on social media platforms is increasingly competing with viewing that happens on SVOD services.

Video engagement on social media platforms — which is largely attributable to four dominant platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook — is massive and growing each year.

Demonstrating its addictive pull, video-centric TikTok now outstrips all other social platforms in watch time, with users spending an average 2.48 hours per day on the app as measured in March 2024, according to cross-platform and device digital media measurement solution Media IDentity Graph (MIDG) platform data provided exclusively to VIP+ from research firm Maverix Insights & Strategy.

As the new VIP+ special report “The Race to Replace TV” explains, social video is becoming a bigger piece of the overall viewing pie for several reasons:

1. Social video increasingly dominates user activity on major social networks as social networks have pivoted to short-form video-centric content strategies to compete with TikTok. Video now accounts for 58.8% of average time spent per day with social networks, up from 48.0% in 2021, per eMarketer.

2. Younger audiences’ video preferences are shifting away from TV and movies. Young people tend to have more diversified media diets that include more gaming, non-premium video and social media. But that has meant they’re spending much less time watching TV and movies compared with older viewers. Watching TV and movies together accounted for just 32% of media time among 13-24-year-olds, versus 59% for consumers over 35, per Hub Entertainment Research.

Both Gen Z and millennials were more likely to say their preferred type of video content is social videos and livestreams rather than old and new TV shows or movies, per an October 2023 survey from Deloitte.

Consumers have only so much time in a day to engage with video. Short-form video and user-generated content consumed on social platforms raise the newer possibility that this viewing will begin to eat into engagement with TV shows and movies.

For some users, watching short-form video could indeed have a disruptive effect on viewing premium video content. Some consumers said their viewing of non-premium online video has in fact reduced time they spend watching “regular” TV (episodic shows or movies), per Hub Entertainment Research.

3. Mobile is becoming the first screen, replacing the TV set — and social video is also being viewed on CTV screens. Smartphones are now the most used screen for watching any kind of video content by a single percentage point over connected TV, per Hub Entertainment Research. That gap is more severe among young people, who may now regard smartphones as their first screen for watching video content. Social video is also carving out a place on living room screens, in more direct confrontation with SVOD apps. YouTube’s CTV viewing has become massive, and TikTok and X are also considering CTV apps.

4. Short-form video platforms are progressively extending the length of videos they allow users to post, capable of driving longer viewing sessions on platforms. Most notably, in its bid to become more like YouTube, the king of short-form video, TikTok, has begun testing video upload limits of 60 minutes, up from a ceiling of 15 in 2023, 10 in 2022, 3 in 2021 and 60 seconds in 2017.

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