Changing video consumption habits create data challenge

A new report confirms video consumption habits are changing, creating a data challenge for enterprise technology leaders.

For the first time, more than half (52.7%) of all broadcaster television content in the UK is being watched via apps rather than traditional over-the-air transmission. The linear broadcast share has fallen to 48.3 percent, a sharp drop from 52.9 percent last year and 61.2 percent in 2023. This audience divide, detailed in the Q2 2025 TiVo Video Trends Report, isn’t just a problem for media companies.

This development is happening against a backdrop of evolving TV licence models, new regulations, and the long-term transition away from digital terrestrial television (DTT). For any enterprise relying on data to understand consumer behaviour or manage marketing spend, the new landscape is a test of its data architecture. As the consumer endpoint splinters, the data required for a complete customer view is now scattered across countless walled gardens.

A deeply fragmented app world

The core challenge is no longer about managing a transition from linear to digital; that transition is over. The new reality is managing a deeply fragmented ecosystem.

According to the report, UK viewers now use an average of just over 7 different video services, up from 6.48 in the previous year. This behaviour is now ingrained, with almost two thirds (64.2%) of UK viewers using more than one app in a typical viewing session.

This fractures the customer data profile. Video consumption habits – a powerful proxy for consumer interest – are now siloed across services like BBC iPlayer, Netflix, Pluto TV, and YouTube. This splintering is also creating consumer friction. The report notes a persistent “discovery dilemma,” with nearly half (48.6%) of respondents finding it “annoying” to have to browse multiple apps to find something to watch.

“As streaming options multiply, the challenge for viewers isn’t access to content, it’s finding what to watch easily,” said Stéphane David, Head of Content Partnerships & Business Development, EMEA at TiVo. “Our UK research shows audiences are increasingly frustrated with jumping between apps. They’re asking for simplicity.”

Ad-tech, churn, and data infrastructure

While consumer behaviour has splintered, it has also created new, addressable opportunities for marketing technology. The report details a “rapid ascent” for free, ad-supported AVOD/FAST services, with 52.5 percent of UK viewers now using them—a 10 percent year-on-year increase.

Cost-saving measures are also pushing audiences toward advertising. In the subscription (SVOD) market, “nearly half now subscribe to ad-supported tiers (up from 37% in 2024)”. Overall, 74.6 percent of UK consumers are at least “ad-tolerant”.

This is where the challenge of changing video consumption habits lands on the CTO’s desk. This new ad inventory is acquired programmatically through ad-tech platforms, which must integrate directly with an enterprise’s own data infrastructure.

A plausible scenario for a national retailer illustrates the new stack. To launch a campaign, its marketing team must target audiences across a dozen apps. The martech stack must ingest real-time bidding data, cross-reference it with the company’s customer profiles, and serve personalised ads.

The data platform’s job is now also retention. The report finds 40.6 percent say they’re “likely to cancel an SVOD service within the next six months”. A primary reason is that “they only subscribed to watch a specific programme (24.5%)”. For a platform, predicting this churn and serving relevant follow-up content is a core data-processing function.

This trend also opens up new revenue models. The report reveals almost half (49.6%) of UK consumers are “open to buying something directly from the TV screen”. This requires even tighter integration between ad-tech, e-commerce platforms, and the data warehouse.

The data aggregation challenge amid changing video consumption habits

Smart TV ownership has climbed to 80.9 percent, but the data from that main screen is firewalled from data on mobile devices or web browsers. Without a robust identity resolution method – which often requires privacy-protecting data clean rooms – building a reliable, single view of the customer is nearly impossible.

This problem is compounded by the fact that relevance is key. While recommendations are improving, “word of mouth” remains the top method for video discovery, cited by 48.9 percent of respondents. This highlights that technical recommendations are only part of the puzzle; the data plan must also find ways to ingest and analyse unstructured social and sentiment data.

For enterprise leaders, the TiVo report confirms that the media landscape is a preview of a broader consumer data challenge. That 52.7 percent app-viewing figure is, at its core, a data aggregation problem for the enterprise.

The role of a CIO’s infrastructure has demonstrably expanded; the performance and integration of data pipelines now directly impact not just advertising efficiency but also customer retention. Likewise, the focus of a Chief Data And Analytics Officer must pivot from simply managing distinct data streams to mastering aggregation and predictive analytics.

Solving the “frustrating” discovery dilemma and countering the 40.6 percent churn risk are data problems that hold the key to business value amid changing video consumption habits.

See also: SK Telecom: Why the AI infrastructure bottleneck matters

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Tags: broadcast, europe, martech, ott, report, research, study, telecoms, tv, uk