It feels like it was only yesterday that it was March 2025 and I was awaiting the latest bunch of 4K TVs from brands. It’s now, somehow, late June already; and Trusted Reviews has been making its way through a fair few of them with more on the horizon. It looks like another busy year for TVs.
And now that we’ve hit summer, another summer of sport is upon us – but how many of us will be catching this content on our TVs?
It was an article on the BBC that sprang my latest musing on this topic, which was titled “Brits spending more time on mobile phones than TV”.
Shortened attention spans
Now for a person in his mid-thirties, that seems wild to me. The idea of ‘events’ doesn’t really happen anymore.
No one really congregates around a TV to catch up with the finale of a TV series or come together to watch a football game unless it’s the final of a major tournament. Watercooler conversations could be had six months after a show has aired. At best, the TV is on in the background while we do something else.
Mobile has created shorter attention spans and also this ‘delayed’ sense of engagement – people can catch highlights and snippets on their phone rather than watch an entire programme. Social media sites such as TikTok and Instagram have fleshed out what Vine tried to do a decade back with short, easily digestible content.
But that’s also affected people’s concentration levels. Everything is verging on a soundbite or a short video rather than something long-form and filling. I sometimes find it hard to watch stuff because it is over in an instant.
The smartphone takeover of… everything
With people consuming more content on their phones, it affects everything. How we tell stories, how we view them, etc. We buy 4K TVs and the majority of us barely watch 4K content on them. That’s arguably down to content being formatted for smaller screens that don’t require the same level of resolution to have an impact.
It’s not helped by streaming services locking HDR to their premium tiers, or the lack of 4K support. UK on-demand apps aside from iPlayer don’t support 4K or HDR. I’ve seen the figures about how much HDR content is viewed on TVs – it’s less than 0.5%. Everyone seems to be on their mobile phones.
The BBC article states that over-65-year-olds spend five hours watching TV while the 15-24 age group spends two hours. That sounds like something close to a chasm, but those 65-year-olds probably weren’t watching as many hours of TV as they were when they were 24 – but still, habits are changing.
Old habits do die hard
I guess what I’m trying to put down in words is that a TV is fairly limited – in ye olden days, if you wanted to watch something, it was only on at this time – you missed it and you missed out.
The era of smartphones and all the breakneck technology it’s brought with it makes it a device that’s always on, always demanding your attention – and perhaps most importantly – you start to think about things as content to be consumed, algorithms that need to be fed.
The biggest screen in your home is no longer the king – it’s the smallest screen that holds all the power.
