Sky launches ‘The Attention Index’

Sky has published its first ‘Attention Index’, revealing how the UK has been watching TV and staying connected over the past six months. Sky customers create billions of interactions with the company every month and each other when they use Sky services.

From January to June 2024 Sky reveal that over two billion hours of content made by Sky have been watched, customers have spent one billion hours watching Sky Sports while 15 million people have viewed Sky News broadcasts.

Sky Broadband customers used over 19 billion GB of data and 111 million GB of mobile data was consumed by Sky Mobile customers.

These millions of interactions provide insight into where people are focusing their attention, how people watch TV and how they stay connected. Coupled with a survey of over 3,000 people, this data forms Sky’s new ‘Attention Index’.

Time spent watching TV is higher than ever in Sky homes, outside of lockdown. On average, Sky customers watch over four and a half hours of TV every day. One third of the TV they watch is made by Sky, including all our world-class sports, news, entertainment and movies.

The report shows that Sky Original productions, such as Mary & George, are performing better than ever before. The Sky Original, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, has had 6.8 million hours of viewing since launching in May, and every episode has been watched by at least 1.3 million people.

The ability to catch up on TV means that people don’t feel the need to watch so many genres ‘live’. This has driven an increase in on demand content, such as Season 4 of True Detective, which has had 10 million viewing hours since it launched on Sky in January 2024, 46% of which was on demand. This compares starkly to True Detective Season One which launched on Sky ten years ago and at the time received 9% of viewing via on demand.

Whether what we’re watching is live or on demand, we’re still a nation of multitaskers when viewing – three in five of (63%) are doing something else whilst we watch TV. Two in five (41%) are actually searching about the TV show as they watch, leading to surges in Google traffic.

Searches were up 164% for Mary and George Villiers, the main characters of Mary and George, the month of launch vs the previous month. Searches for Auschwitz in the UK increased by 107% in line with The Tattooist of Auschwitz airing on Sky – with over 230,000 searches in the month of launch, the highest in 20 years.

Overall, viewing of Sky Sports was up 17% in 2023. Over the last six months, sports fans watched a staggering one billion hours of sport on Sky. Our audience is expanding too – in 2023, female viewing of Sky Sports was up 18% and under 35 viewing was up 26%. ATV Today