How Poles watch TV - Easter out-of-home

The ongoing pandemic and restrictions that accompany it suggest that Poles should have spent Easter at their homes. Was it really so? At Gemius we took a look at Poles’ behaviour through the prism of Mediapanel research. It turned out that many of them spent Easter in front of the TV, but… not necessarily their own.

Mediapanel research allows to analyse TV viewership not only in general terms but also broken down into in-home and out-of-home categories. Analysts at Gemius first took a look, whether Easter had an impact on the TV consumption increase. According to the data, during the Easter weekend, both the number of TV viewers and the time spent in front of the TV have increased. Between 29.03 and 11.04 most people watched the TV on Sunday, April 4th (29.1M Real Users), while on Monday, April 5th, they have been watching it for the longest period of time (almost 7 hours).

Source: Mediapanel, 29.03.2021 – 11.04.2021; RU, ATS; TV total

In-home and out-of-home TV viewership analysis indicates that out-of-home consumption is responsible for a significant surge. In this case, metrics’ increases are much more notable – the number of Real Users who watched TV out of home amounted to 11.2M on April 4th, which is over 4M more than the daily average for the remaining weekdays. The average time spent per user during Easter was equal to almost 2 hours.

Source: Mediapanel, 29.03.2021 – 11.04.2021; RU, ATS; TV OOH

We have also examined whether this relation applies to the largest TV stations in Poland – TVN, Polsat and TVP1. There is no surprise, that all these stations noticed significant increases in the amount of out-of-home TV viewers, however, it was the most apparent for TVP1 - the number of viewers on April 4th was 1.6M greater than the day before.

Source: Mediapanel, 29.03.2021 – 11.04.2021; selected TV stations: TVN, Polsat, TVP1; RU, TV OOH

In order to verify if this media consumption model is specific for the holiday season, we compared the trends observed during Christmas, which was also marked by the pandemic. The conclusions are similar – both the number of Real Users and the time spent in front of the TV have increased during Christmas (11.3M Real Users on December 25th) and on New Year’s Eve (11.2M Real Users).