Love Island and rescheduled sport events help TV habits edge ‘back to normality’

Television consumption patterns "settled" further in the third quarter of 2021 as the more extreme effects of the pandemic on the Irish market faded and audiences got "back to normality", according to research by marketing communications group Core.

Live television viewership decreased only 3.3 per cent year-on-year in July-September – a more moderate decline than the 7 per cent year-on-year drop recorded in the first half of 2021, when the 2020 comparison period included a spike in news and other TV consumption as the Covid-19 crisis unfolded.

The slower rate of decline in the third quarter means that for the first nine months of 2021, the drop in viewership is now 5.3 per cent year-on-year.

For adults aged 15-34, year-on-year viewership was down 4.6 per cent in the third quarter and is running 11.2 per cent lower in the first nine months than it was in January-September 2020.

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Viewing among this age group was boosted by the return of Love Island to Virgin Media Television, with the series airing 49 episodes between June 28th and August 23rd.

Love Island, the summer edition of which was cancelled in 2020, helped streaming levels on Virgin Media Player surge by a massive 386 per cent year-on-year, with the ITV Studios dating series accounting for more than 60 per cent of Virgin’s streams in the third quarter, Core said.

Overall, streaming on television broadcasters' players was up 20 per cent year-on-year in the quarter, with the staging of the rescheduled Euro 2020 and Tokyo 2020 in 2021 lifting usage of RTÉ Player compared to last year's sport-light summer.

Irish adults watched an average of 151 minutes of television a day (excluding streaming) in the third quarter, or just over 2½ hours, Core said, citing data compiled for ratings body TAM Ireland by research firm Nielsen.

August was a particular good month relative to the same month in 2020, when the economy had reopened and fewer sporting events were broadcast.

Sport ratings

The most-watched television programme in 2021 up to the end of September was the GAA All-Ireland football final, which was watched by an average of 877,170 people, excluding streams, putting it ahead of the Euro 2020 final, which was watched by 837,477 people.

Euro 2020 was “a game of two halves” for RTÉ, with the absence of the Republic of Ireland meaning viewing on RTÉ2 (excluding streams) was down 23 per cent for the group games compared to the 2016 tournament (when some games were shown on Virgin Media One).

Euro 2020’s ratings performance exceeded that of 2016 for the semi-final and final stages, as interest in England’s participation snowballed, but viewing for the tournament as a whole was still down 15 per cent, Core said.

News audiences have subsided since their crisis peak, it also noted, with viewership of RTÉ’s 9pm bulletin 19 per cent lower in the first nine months of 2021 compared to the same period last year.

“This is not surprising given the hyper attention paid to the news in 2020 when the pandemic first emerged,” the report concludes. However, news viewership is still running 10 per cent higher than it was in 2019, suggesting there is “still an appetite for news content”.