This statistic displays the average weekly time spent watching television in Canada from the 2016/2017 to 2017/18 broadcast year, broken down by age group. Adults in Canada between the ages of 18 to 34 spent an average of 16.2 hours a week watching TV in the 2016/17 broadcast year, and this in the 2017/18 period this figure increased to 13.7 hours.
TV consumption in Canada - additional information
According to the most recent data, Canadians spent 581 minutes a day with major media, which is close to ten hours of daily media time. Taking a deeper look at the specific media split, on average, adults in the country spent 24 minutes with print media, 94 minutes listening to the radio, 202 minutes watching TV, and the largest portion of time – 261 minutes – consuming digital media of all sorts. TV consumption is more common among seniors in Canada, who were reported to have watched more than 38 hours of TV programming in the 2017/18 broadcast year. In comparison, the average adult Canadian’s TV viewing that year amounted to 23.3 hours per week.
In 2016 it was measured that ten percent of the Canadian population watched TV exclusively online. In 2015, studies conducted among Canadian consumers revealed that cord-cutting was significantly higher among Canadian Millennials, with more than half of this group indicating a lack of a regular TV service, such as cable, satellite or over-the-air subscription. In contrast, the same was true for only three percent of consumers aged 65 and older.
The ability to watch time-shifted TV, as opposed to live viewing, has brought about services such as subscription video-on-demand. It is believed that in 2018 there were 13.3 million people subscribing to Netflix in Canada. The popularity and accessibility of programming on such platforms also introduced the notion of binge viewing, defined as watching at least three episodes of a TV show in one sitting. Among Canadians, such consumption patterns were again more common for Millennials: 78 percent of young consumers in the country between the ages of 18 and 26 were binge watching TV shows in the fall of 2015.
