Today is World TV Day, the UN’s celebration of the global cultural impact of television. Today, like every other day, billions of people will together spend billions of hours watching TV, talking about it and sharing it.
To mark World Television Day, TV companies from around the world have compiled facts and stats to bring the scale and popularity of TV to life as it continues to live at the heart of the world’s media consumption.
AUSTRALIA
TV reaches 16 million Australians every day, who watch a total of more than four billion minutes of broadcast TV every day. In fact, Australian households are 30 per cent more likely to have a TV set than a barbeque.
CANADA
Canadians watch 130 million hours of TV every day – that’s the equivalent of four Super Bowls. What’s more, the average TV campaign in Canada delivers an amazing 317 million impressions.
UNITED KINGDOM
In 2016, the average viewer in the UK will have watched over 1,300 hours of TV – the equivalent of watching all seasons of Breaking Bad, Orange is the New Black and House of Cards more than 10 times over. In addition, every night in the UK there are 17 million conversations about TV advertising.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TV reaches 210 million people every day, who collectively watch 840,000,000 hours of TV per day. If you stood all of TV’s daily viewers one on top of the other, they would stretch all the way to the moon.
GERMANY
Germans watched an average of 223 minutes of TV per day – or 16 billion minutes in total: That’s 30,000 years of TV in one year!
FRANCE
Every day in 2016, 43.5 million people in France tune into TV on a television set. With the average daily audience of 2015, you could fill the Stade de France 558 times.
ITALY
The total time Italians spent watching television in 2015 is equivalent to the time it takes to play 1,032 football matches, to bake 61,911 pizzas or to brew 222,878 cups of espresso.
SPAIN
A whopping 33 million Spaniards watch TV each day. You would have to fill Real Madrid’s home stadium 408 times to get the same reach with any other medium.
POLAND
In Poland, 25 million people tune in each day for an average of four hours and 18 minutes – totaling a mind-boggling 483,883,433 daily views.
318 stadiums would have been necessary to fit all Poles watching the Poland-Portugal game of the Euro 2016.
PORTUGAL
8.3 Million people watch television daily in Portugal. That’s twice as much as Cristiano Ronaldo’s followers on Twitter.
SWEDEN
The most-watched program in 2016 – the final of the Eurovision Song Contest – was viewed by 3.6 million people, or four out of every ten Swedes.
FINLAND
3,679,000 Fins watched an average of four hours of TV each day (2015). That means that in average, the equivalent of over six million hockey games are being watched on TV by Fins daily.
THE NETHERLANDS
TV reaches 11.2 million people daily who watch a total of 49 million hours every day (2016). You would be a multi-billionaire if you received one Euro for every hour watched by the Dutch in 2015 (18 billion hours).
SWITZERLAND
The most-watched program in 2016 – the Switzerland v. France match during Euro 2016 – reached 2,206,890 viewers, or three times as many Swiss people as there are cows in Switzerland. With this number, you could also fill the biggest stadium in Switzerland 57 times.
BELGIUM
With the average national daily audience in Belgium, you can fill 76 times Camp Nou, the largest stadium in Europe.
BRAZIL
So many people tune in in Brazil – 132.5 million watch daily – that the average minute rating in primetime is equivalent to the entire population of the United Kingdom (64.8 million).
CHILE, COLUMBIA, PERU
Over five million people watch television every day in Chile. This number reaches 13.5 million people daily in Columbia and 16 million in Peru in a week. Combined, that’s the equivalent to the number of people who have visited the Rio Carnival over the past 35 years!
CHINA
The Chinese watch an average of 251 minutes of TV per day (2015), and in 2014 created 3,277,400 hours of TV content.
Of course, viewership is only part of TV’s success story. The other is the countless roles it plays in our lives, whether it’s sharpening the world’s focus on major issues, providing a platform for freedom of expression and cultural diversity, nurturing education or – perhaps most importantly – uniting people around once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
Have a happy 2016 World Television Day!
