As the television landscape continues to experience seismic shifts in consumer behaviour, Asian American viewers are, in many ways, leading the charge says a study from Horowitz Research.
According to FOCUS Asian: The Media Landscape 2018 report, Asian TV content viewers in the US have adopted streaming more quickly than the general market. Indeed, it showed that three-quarters (75%) of Asian TV content viewers stream at least some of their TV content, compared with 68% of total market.The study also found that on average, Asian TV viewers spend 44% of their time streaming, while 38% of their time is still devoted to live TV. Among TV viewers overall, 35% of their time is spent streaming, with 43% still devoted to live TV. Notably, Asians are twice as likely as total market TV viewers to have all but abandoned live TV. A full 14% of Asian TV viewers spend upwards of 75% of their viewing time with streamed content, compared to 7% among consumers overall.
YouTube, specifically, plays a large role in Asian American TV viewers’ TV lifestyles, Horowitz observed that 82% of Asian streamers say that they use YouTube for TV content and they are more than twice as likely as total market streamers to say that their first go-to service to watch TV is YouTube (21% vs. 10% of total market). Additionally, Asian streamers reported that when they are streaming TV content, they spend as much time watching YouTube (28% of their streaming time) as Netflix (29% of their streaming time). The affinity for YouTube is driven largely by bilingual and Asian-language dominant viewers: among English dominant Asians, 15% report going to YouTube first; 29% of bilingual and Asian-language dominant viewers go to YouTube first.
“The Asian audience has long posed a challenge for traditional TV providers. There has always been a market for in-language and culturally relevant content, but the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Asian market has made scalability a hurdle,” commented Adriana Waterston, Horowitz’s SVP of Insights and Strategy. “This is why we saw that even before broadband and YouTube, bilingual and Asian-language dominant Asian audiences were going online to find the content they wanted. Streaming solves the scalability issue, which presents an opportunity for both traditional and new providers to super-serve Asian viewers.”
