Data: Italy TV audiences lowest in 10 years
January 17, 2022
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
Italian TV audiences have continued to drop, reaching the lowest numbers in a decade in December 2021.
Data from Studio Frasi reveals that the negative performance was recorded for both average daily audience figures (10.2 million, -1.6 million on December 2020) as well as in prime time (22.9 million, -3.8 million compared to December 2020 and -4 million on December 2012).
The trend was confirmed in the Quarterly Observatory of Italy’s Communications Authority (AgCom) that showed a drop of 1.4 million average viewers in September 2021 (-2.3 million compared to September 2017).
However, interest in free-to-air and pay-TV OTT platforms is growing, thanks to the increasingly widespread use of Smart TVs.
According to the AgCom Observatory, based on Comscore data, Netflix had 8.8 million unique users in September 2021, followed by Amazon Prime Video (6.8 million); DAZN (3.4 million); and Disney+ (2.9 million).
Chili, Discovery+ and TimVision followed with less than one million unique users, while Mediaset Infinity and Now TV had 100,000 unique users each. However, TimVision and DAZN are likely to have improved their performance in the period after September, thanks to the Serie A effect.
The AgCom and Comscore figures also show that 188 minutes were devoted to subscription-based OTT platforms in September 2021, while 219 million were dedicated to FTA.