One of the main complaints about streaming services has been how hard it is to find something to watch. Now, according to Nielsen’s new State of Play report that came out today, showing how cord cutters are spending less time now picking something to watch vs. 2022.
According to Nielsen, the average time to find something to watch is now 10 minutes and 30 seconds. That is down from 11 minutes and 16 seconds that we spent back in October of 2022. Overall though, we are still spending over three minutes more to pick a show compared to March of 2019, when we spent 7 minutes and 24 seconds.
“Compared with traditional cable packages and schedules, digital media has few, if any, confines. There is seemingly infinite space for new services, channels, content creators and business strategies. The flipside, however, is that the audience is finite, and it fragments across every new platform and channel that debuts.” Nielsen said in its State of Play report today.
The good news is after years where streamers are taking longer and longer to pick something to watch, that time has started to shrink. This comes as streaming services that have worked on improvements to their apps to make content discovery easier. We have also seen a trend where streaming services are using algorithms to better recommend content to subscribers.
On the flipside, cord cutters are becoming better at finding what they want. Over the last few years, multiple new services hit the market. This was a wealth of new content to look through. Now many streamers are well aware of what these services have to offer, helping to cut back on the time it takes to look across multiple apps.
Streaming services have made content discovery a main focus to help improve the streaming services. This includes Warner Bros. Discovery releasing Max with a new user interface to help with content discovery.