The TV schedule is dying. The telly isn't.
Here's a number that would have sounded absurd ten years ago: on Christmas Day 2025, 54% of everything watched on American television sets came through streaming — the largest single-day share Nielsen has ever measured. Not cable. Not broadcast. Apps.
And here's the twist that most takes miss: the television set itself is doing fine. In the UK, 84% of in-home video viewing still happens on the telly, according to Ofcom's Media Nations 2025 report. What's dying isn't the screen in the corner of the living room. It's the schedule.
The numbers, plainly
Start with the official UK picture. Ofcom has been tracking this for years, and the direction is unambiguous:
- Broadcast content made up 56% of in-home viewing in 2024 — down from 71% in 2017 (Ofcom Media Nations 2025).
- 2022 saw the biggest annual drop ever recorded: weekly broadcast reach fell from 83% to 79%, and average daily viewing fell 12% in a single year, from 2h 59m to 2h 38m (Media Nations 2023).
- By 2024 the average was down to 2h 24m a day, still falling (Media Nations 2025).
In the US, Nielsen's Gauge tells the same story with sharper milestones. Streaming passed cable for the first time in July 2022. By May 2025 it passed broadcast and cable combined — 44.8% against 44.2%. Between 2021 and 2025, streaming grew 71% while cable shrank 39%.
Two generations, two different televisions
The starkest number in the whole of Media Nations 2025 is this: viewers aged 16–24 give just 19% of their viewing time to broadcaster content. Viewers over 75 give it 90%.
That's not a gap; it's two different worlds. A typical 16–24-year-old watches around half an hour of broadcast TV a day, and only about twenty minutes of it live (Media Nations 2024). Their grandparents' viewing is still, overwhelmingly, the schedule. Nobody grows back into the schedule as they age — the habit simply isn't being formed.
You can see the next generation's habits forming already: one in five UK children now goes straight to the YouTube app when they turn on the TV set (Ofcom, 2025).
YouTube just overtook ITV. Read that again.
In 2024, YouTube became the UK's second most-watched service by total viewing share — ahead of ITV, about a point behind the whole of the BBC's linear channels (Ofcom, using Barb data). Its viewing on television sets doubled in two years. Live-streaming platforms tell the same story at global scale: Twitch alone clocked around 20 billion hours watched in 2024.
Meanwhile the broadcasters are racing to meet viewers where they've gone. BBC iPlayer served 4.5 billion hours in 2024/25, up 25% in a year, and now accounts for 23% of all BBC TV viewing — it was 14% in 2022 (BBC Annual Report 2024/25). Streaming subscriptions are simply normal now: seven in ten UK homes have at least one, with Netflix in 18 million households (Barb, Q4 2025).
The endgame: TV over the internet, full stop
This is no longer just a viewer trend — it's becoming policy. The BBC's Director-General has publicly backed switching off traditional broadcast transmission in the 2030s and moving to internet-only delivery. The UK government's 2026 Green Paper sees "a strong case" for a managed transition to internet-based TV by 2034, with terrestrial TV only committed to the end of that year.
Follow that to its conclusion: within a decade, all television in Britain may be TV delivered over the internet. The aerial gets retired; the schedule becomes one option among many rather than the default.
What this means if you're the one holding the remote
Strip the jargon away and "IPTV" just means television delivered over the internet — which, as the numbers above show, is rapidly becoming all television. The catch is that internet TV grew up fragmented: one app per service, a dozen interfaces, and nothing resembling the one thing the old world genuinely got right — a single guide where you could see everything at a glance.
That's the gap we think matters. The schedule is dying; the guide shouldn't. seefax is our attempt at that — a player that takes the TV you already pay for and puts it back into one proper guide, with what's on now and next, on whichever screen you're holding. The telly survived the streaming revolution. The experience of using it deserves to get better, not messier.
Every figure above is from the named source: Ofcom Media Nations (2023–2025), Nielsen's The Gauge, Barb, and the BBC's 2024/25 Annual Report.