The triumph of the moving image continues in Switzerland
More than four million Swiss people use streaming services. While the overall share of streaming users remains relatively stable, daily usage has increased by more than 35 percent over the past four years to more than one million users per day. These are the findings of the latest figures from the NET-Metrix-Base 2018-1 baseline study on internet usage in Switzerland.
Swiss internet users are using online video and audio content more and more frequently. More than 37% of internet users state that they consume streaming content several times a week or more. Almost half (47%) of them do this daily or almost daily. At 60.3%, men are still overrepresented in the group of frequent streaming users. The proportion of digital natives (14 to 29-year-olds) is also above average: six out of ten internet users in this age group use streaming content at least several times a week.
Video content more popular than audio content
Videos on dedicated portals (such as YouTube) have the highest share among streaming users: 69.5% report that they use these services several times a month or more, which corresponds to more than 2.9 million internet users. Video streaming on TV channel portals (such as Play SRF) is in second place on the popularity scale with more than 2.5 million viewers (61.7% of streaming users), closely followed by web radio/live radio with over 2.3 million listeners (56.4% of streaming users).
Large screens for longer use
The smartphone remains the preferred device for streaming activities: it is used by 72% of streaming users. However, if we look at streaming activities in detail, larger screens are preferred for web TV and films and series on paid video-on-demand portals (such as Netflix): 72.1% of web TV users use a desktop PC, laptop or tablet to watch TV. Among users of paid video-on-demand portals, the figure is 64.4%.
