Bob Dylan said it, and we all listened. The times they were a changin’.
We all knew he was talking about media when he meant it: He was forecasting the coming age of social media. In fact Dylan even cut a paragraph where he said “come buyers and sellers, who plan spots with spreadsheets. Go digital now or soon you will weep.”*
For the past decade we’ve seen poll after poll prophesising the decline of traditional media and the ascent of the second-screen. No one watches TV anymore, we’re all too busy looking at Reels, or something.
So of course, we don’t even need to look at the numbers here, right? We can just say TV is dead, we all have to buy spots from… What’s that? Sorry, we’re hearing from our numbers guy that we do need to look at the stats. Because for the first time, linear TV and Streaming have overtaken Global Video Platforms (YouTube, Tik-Tok, Instagram, Facebook) in their viewership.
So let’s take a look at the actual state of things in Aotearoa:
Cost of living pressures continue to shape household decisions.
Gone are the days where you could have a single streaming service and watch everything. Now, New Zealanders are making the decision to cut back on the amount of services they use. Especially as the cost of subscriptions rise.
The media ecosystem is settling down.
We’ve seen a huge amount of shake up in the past decade as all these new platforms disrupt. Now the dust has settled and we’re entering a more stable environment. Like a stoat unleashed into the bush, these disruptors are now having to co-exist with what they wished to destroy.
Audiences have more choice than ever before.
There’s more platforms than ever before, and there’s more ways to be watching than ever before. With more ways to watch, audiences are also growing more individualised.
Here’s New Zealand’s top five platforms in terms of their daily reach:
- Total TV (Linear TV and Video on demand) – 63%
- Global Video Sharing Platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram) – 62%
- News (online or print) – 53%
- Linear TV – 51%
- Streaming Video on Demand – 50%
*Bob Dylan did not in fact write The Times They Are A-Changin’ about streaming platforms. We made this part up.
**The rest of the data we didn’t make up. It’s from TVNZ Verian’s “Where are the Audiences, 2026”.