Friday Insights: Catching up to keep up

10 August 2017

In the past, if you missed the first episode of a series you probably wrote the whole thing off because you’d never fully understand what was going on. Luckily, times have changed and TV broadcasters are constantly developing and refining the catch-up services they offer.

These services have primarily been used to time-shift programming, allowing viewers to watch at a time that is more convenient for them than scheduled, but recent conversations with a key client of ours has unearthed a theory that a new pattern of behaviour is emerging on catch-up services when it comes to keeping up-to-date with popular, regularly scheduled series such as Love Island or Big Brother. For shows of this nature, there is a notion that catch-up is used to keep on track with the live rhythm of the shows (e.g. office conversations or social media chat) and we thought this warranted further exploration.