The NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute annually conducts “Rating Survey on Young Children’s TV Viewing” to study young children’s TV viewing as well as the use of recorded programs, DVDs, and internet videos. Children’s media use is becoming more and more diverse: they not only watch television programs in real time but also view diverse content on various media. The problem with the conventional measurement method is that it cannot gauge such diversifying content viewing with the same yardstick.
In response to this issue, the author attempted to re–calculate the results of the 2020 rating survey (web–method survey), employing the same yardstick for real–time, recoded program, DVD, and internet video viewing, so that we could examine young children’s content viewing, which involves different media platforms and devices, regardless of media platforms and viewing patterns.
For this analysis, we introduced an entirely new index that shows the total amount of views by children per week for each title, using the same duration (minutes) as a yardstick for all titles. We call this index “power to attract young children’s viewing.” Furthermore, based on this “power to attract young children’s viewing,” which is calculated separately for real–time, recorded program, DVD, and internet video viewing, we added them up to measure the overall “power” of each title across media, and we call it “total power to attract young children’s viewing.”
High–ranking titles in terms of “total power to attract young children’s viewing” mainly consist of TV content including NHK’s ETV programs and commercial broadcasters’ animation works, but BabyBus and HikakinTV–both YouTube content–are also ranked high.
The new calculation method used for this survey has indicated that there are still some issues to be solved with this method, but we believe it can serve as an index showing the trend of content–viewing other than that of real–time, which allows us to understand the overall picture of young children’s content–viewing.