The Shift Is Well Underway
Ofcom's annual research into UK media consumption provides the most reliable picture of how people in Britain actually consume content. The 2024 data tells a clear story: video is the dominant content format online, and the way people watch it has changed fundamentally.
UK adults now average approximately four hours and thirty minutes of video viewing per day across all devices. That figure includes broadcast TV, streaming services, YouTube, and short-form social video — and the balance between them is shifting significantly.
Broadcast TV Is in Long-Term Decline
Average daily broadcast TV viewing fell to two hours and twenty-four minutes in 2024 — a four per cent decline year-on-year, and part of a consistent downward trend over the past decade. The decline is most pronounced among younger audiences: less than a quarter of 16–24-year-olds' in-home video viewing is broadcaster content. Among over-75s, that figure remains at around 90 per cent.
This isn't a collapse — broadcast TV still commands significant daily viewership — but it represents a fundamental rebalancing of where audiences spend their time.
YouTube Is Now the UK's Second Most-Watched Video Platform
According to Ofcom's Media Nations 2025 report, YouTube is the second most-watched video service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of ITV. UK adults average 39 minutes per day watching YouTube, with 16 of those minutes on TV sets rather than phones or laptops — a figure that has grown significantly as smart TVs have become standard.
For businesses, this matters: YouTube is no longer just a platform for viral clips. It is where a substantial proportion of the UK adult population goes to learn about products and services, research companies, and make purchasing decisions.
91% of UK adult internet users watch video or clips online. — Ofcom Adults' Media Use and Attitudes Report 2024
What This Means for Businesses
The shift in viewing behaviour creates both an opportunity and an obligation for businesses investing in content. The opportunity: high-quality video content now reaches audiences on platforms where they are genuinely engaged, choosing what to watch. Unlike a broadcast commercial that interrupts a programme, a well-produced YouTube video or LinkedIn brand film is content the viewer has actively chosen to engage with.
The obligation: production quality matters more than it once did. When your brand film sits alongside professionally produced content on the same platform, a poorly lit talking-head piece signals something unflattering about the organisation behind it. Audiences have been conditioned by years of high-quality streaming content to expect a certain standard — even from corporate video.
The Social Video Picture
Short-form video on Instagram Reels, TikTok, and LinkedIn has become a significant part of the content mix for businesses across most sectors. The platforms themselves favour video content in their algorithms — organic reach for video consistently outperforms static imagery across most platforms, though this changes as algorithms evolve.
The practical implication: the most cost-effective content strategies plan for multiple deliverables from a single shoot. A hero brand film, cut down into 60-second, 30-second, and 15-second social versions across multiple aspect ratios, gives a business months of content from a single production investment.
The Business Case for Video
Wyzowl's 2025 State of Video Marketing survey — the longest-running annual study of its kind — found that 87 per cent of respondents said they had been convinced to buy a product or service after watching a video. The survey sample is relatively small (around 205 respondents), so treat this as indicative rather than definitive — but the directional finding is consistent year on year.
More concretely: video content on a company website gives visitors a faster and more emotionally resonant understanding of what the organisation does and whether they want to work with it. That understanding — achieved in two minutes of watching rather than ten minutes of reading — shortens the distance between a first visit and an enquiry.
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