UK TV Viewing in 2025: What BARB’s new report reveals for Asian broadcasters
BARB, the UK’s official audience measurement body, has published its first annual report, ‘What People Watched in 2025’, offering a comprehensive look at how viewers consumed television across live broadcasts, on-demand platforms, and streaming services last year.
The findings are vital for major broadcasters—including leading Asian channels such as Utsav Plus, ZEE TV, Sony TV, ARY Digital, Hum TV, and others that rely on BARB data to track UK audience engagement.
The report confirms that live viewing remains resilient, accounting for 45% of all identified TV-set viewing in December 2025. Key live moments of the year included the Women’s Euros final, BBC One’s hit show ‘Celebrity Traitors’, and Channel 4 favourite ‘Gogglebox’.
Meanwhile, on-demand viewing—via broadcasters’ VoD services, global streamers and video-sharing platforms—represented 38% of total viewing in 2025. Much of the time spent on major streamers such as Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ went to older catalogue titles, underscoring the continued value of long-term content libraries.
In terms of navigation habits, Freeview, Sky and smart TV EPGs remained the most-used TV interfaces, with YouTube ranking fourth. BARB also noted that 37% of viewing sessions began on one of the UK’s top ten TV channels, while Netflix dominated first-choice viewing among 16–34-year-olds, accounting for 26% of TV set switch-ons in that demographic. For children aged 4–15, YouTube was the top starting point, also at 26%.
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The report highlights a significant surge in YouTube consumption via TV sets, particularly among younger viewers. Children aged 4–15 accounted for a quarter of all YouTube viewing on TV sets, despite representing just one-seventh of the UK population.
Asian broadcasters closely monitor these shifts, supported by the award-winning BizAsiaLive.com, which provides daily BARB ratings updates for Asian TV channels. For example, today’s exclusive data from BizAsiaLive.com confirmed that ARY Digital topped the first day of Ramadan in the UK’s Urdu genre on Wednesday. ARY Digital secured a 0.05% share, matching Hum TV, while its flagship Ramadan programme ‘Shan-e-Iftar’ attracted 6,000 viewers.
Justin Sampson, Chief Executive at BARB, commented: “Commentary about television is too often based on a binary premise that ignores a more complex reality. BARB’s independent evidence points to a world in which viewing is defined more by adaptation than disruption. The prognosis is more connected, nuanced and resilient than the clichés and partial viewpoints suggest. Live audiences are healthy, children and young people haven’t deserted linear services, and there’s an increasingly symbiotic relationship between all services and platforms in the TV ecosystem.”
