Conviva has released new data showing how significantly daytime viewership has surged due to virus-related stay-at-home guidelines. Comparing viewership during the week of March 17-23 to viewership in the 2 weeks immediately preceding, Conviva found increases between 33%-43% in the 10am-5pm window (see chart below). The peak increase of 43% was achieved at 11am.

Early morning hours of 6am-9am also saw a surge of between 14%-33%, while early fringe of 5pm-7pm had increases between 7%-31%. Traditional primetime viewership has been mostly unaffected, with 8pm (+2%), 9pm (-3%) and 10pm (-4%).

The net impact of this is a shift in total viewing per day from the 3 hours of the night primetime daypart to the 7 hour daytime daypart. Conviva said that viewership in the 7 hour daytime daypart March 17-23 comprised 32.3% of total viewing per day (vs. 18.9% in the 3 hours of night primetime) up from 27.1% in the March 3-9 window (vs. 22.4% in night primetime). Note that viewing time per hour is still higher in night primetime.

As points of comparison, yesterday Comcast said that downstream peak traffic has moved slightly from 9pm to between 7pm-8pm (although peak upload times has moved significantly, from 9pm to between 8-6pm). Yesterday SambaTV also said that daytime viewing in the US from March 23-27 was up 121% vs. the same period a year ago, across 190 TV channels it analyzes. Samba also said daytime viewership of cable news (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Fox Business and CNBC) was up 347% vs. a year ago.

Back to Conviva, it also reported total streaming up almost 21% globally in the March 17-23 week vs. 2 weeks earlier. The fastest growing region was Africa (+32.8%), followed by Americas (+26.6%), Oceana (26.4%) and Europe (+2.2%). Asia was down 10%.

Conviva also noted that local news outlets appear to be the biggest beneficiary of viewers hungry to stay informed. Local news outlets had a 247% jump in social news views on Facebook, and a 118% increase in views per video, both well ahead of national outlets. Twitter also appears to be a successful point of distribution for local news outlets with the highest increases in engagements per video (196%), engagement rate (63%) and engagements per post (62%). Facebook, Instagram and YouTube all trailed.

Conviva collects data from its proprietary technology that’s embedded in 3 billion streaming video applications. On an annual basis, viewers using these apps watch 150 billion streams in 180 countries.

The full report can be accessed here. For a curated list of virus-related video data, see VideoNuze’s Coronavirus Video Research Hub (and if you have data/insights, please share them with me).