Do you find it difficult to find something to watch?

Do you find it difficult to find something to watch?

We asked that question to thousands of consumers globally and found that less than half of UK consumers (46%) know what they want to watch and where to find it. What’s more, less than a third of UK consumers (31%) use a cross-service aggregator to help them search for content.

These numbers are substantially lower than the overall global averages – at 56% and 42%, respectively.

What’s unique about the UK media market is that we have more services than average, including a strong broadcaster video on demand (BVOD) presence and a lot of great home-grown and global content. In our house, we’ve enjoyed some fantastic PSB output like Red Eye, Breathtaking and The Cuckoo this year, along with locally produced shows from global streamers such as Fool Me Once, Scoop and Baby Reindeer.

In the UK, we also have a plethora of services to use for our content platforms, making aggregation service adoption less popular – 10% lower than the global average, in fact.

When there is so much content to watch across so many disparate platforms and channels, it creates serial churners.

The UK media industry is not immune to this trend, with consumers cancelling an average of 2.4 services in the past year versus 1.8 services among all consumers globally.

These findings clearly indicate there is an opportunity here for UK media companies to improve the consumer experience and their bottom line.

They must get out of their comfort zone and place big bets where customers are shifting and even enter new industries.

Collaboration will help many companies to be successful on their innovation journey. The UK media industry is positioned well in this regard because it is a close-knit community that appreciates the power of ecosystems.

Take Freely as an example – a new streaming service from Everyone TV, backed by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, that allows its users to stream live channels through smart TVs and watch on-demand content from the UK’s biggest broadcasters.

They are finding solutions to improve customer experiences, grow content distribution and enhance their use of technology.

Jonathan Thompson, CEO of Everyone TV, acknowledges that cross-industry collaboration is critical, “We’re in an age of media consumption in the UK where viewing via smart TVs connected to broadband is increasingly the norm. The availability of universal public service television is of paramount importance to the UK and all its public service broadcasters, which is achievable when we come together as an industry to create a new service like Freely.”

Radical reinvention is no small task, but it is a necessity that cannot be ignored. The media industry’s evolution isn’t going to slow down; it’s going to speed up. For legacy media companies, this can be a time of fear and reaction, or it can be a time of bold decisions and rewarding outcomes.

Stuart Green is media and entertainment lead at Accenture