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Media trends—Asian Americans leading changing TV viewing habits

by | Dec 18, 2018 | Public Relations

As the television landscape continues to experience seismic shifts in consumer behavior, Asian American viewers are, in many ways, leading the charge—according to Horowitz Research’s FOCUS Asian: The Media Landscape 2018 report, Asian TV content viewers have adopted streaming more quickly than the general market: Three-quarters (75 percent) of Asian TV content viewers stream at least some of their TV content, compared to 68 percent of total market.

On average, Asian TV viewers spend 44 percent of their time streaming, while 38 percent of their time is still devoted to live TV. Among TV viewers overall, 35 percent of their time is spent streaming, with 43 percent still devoted to live TV. Notably, Asians are twice as likely as total market TV viewers to have all but abandoned live TV. A full 14 percent of Asian TV viewers spend upwards of 75 percent of their viewing time with streamed content, compared to 7 percent among consumers overall.

YouTube, specifically, plays a large role in Asian American TV viewers’ TV lifestyles

Eighty-two percent of Asian streamers say that they use YouTube for TV content and they are more than twice as likely as total market streamers to say that their first go-to service to watch TV is YouTube (21 percent vs. 10 percent of total market). Additionally, Asian streamers report that when they are streaming TV content, they spend as much time watching YouTube (28 percent of their streaming time) as Netflix (29 percent of their streaming time). The affinity for YouTube is driven largely by bilingual and Asian-language dominant viewers: among English dominant Asians, 15 percent report going to YouTube first; 29 percent of bilingual and Asian-language dominant viewers go to YouTube first.

“The Asian audience has long posed a challenge for traditional TV providers. There has always been a market for in-language and culturally relevant content, but the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Asian market has made scalability a hurdle” said Adriana Waterston, Horowitz’s SVP of Insights and Strategy, in a news release. “This is why we saw that even before broadband and YouTube, bilingual and Asian-language dominant Asian audiences were going online to find the content they wanted. Streaming solves the scalability issue, which presents an opportunity for both traditional and new providers to super-serve Asian viewers.”

Media trends—Asian Americans leading changing TV viewing habits

Now in its second year of publication, FOCUS Asian: The Media Landscape, is a two-part phone and online survey conducted among 300 Asian TV content viewers who are heads of household and 300 Asian streamers. The full report provides analyses of the Asian audience by key demographic, subscription, and viewing segments, including age, sex, income, ethnicity (Chinese, Indian, and Filipino), and MVPD subs vs. non-subs.

Richard Carufel
Richard Carufel is editor of Bulldog Reporter and the Daily ’Dog, one of the web’s leading sources of PR and marketing communications news and opinions. He has been reporting on the PR and communications industry for over 17 years, and has interviewed hundreds of journalists and PR industry leaders. Reach him at richard.carufel@bulldogreporter.com; @BulldogReporter

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