Switched On: How Australia Watches TV in 2025

Every few years someone announces the death of television. Netflix arrived in Australia in 2015, YouTube moved onto the big screen, and the antenna on the roof began to look like a relic. Yet the free-to-air networks still report audiences of millions, and the biggest nights of the year still happen on Seven, Nine, 10, the ABC and SBS.

So which is it? This story uses the newest data available, from the national media regulator (ACMA), the official TV ratings (OzTAM), the networks and Screen Australia, to answer four questions:

THIS STORY ANSWERS

Are Australians still watching TV, and how do they tune in?
Who is watching: does age change everything?
What do we watch live, and what do we stream?
Who pays for the shows, and where are they made?

CH 01 HOW WE WATCH

The box is still in the corner

In eight years, Australians went from watching mostly through an antenna to watching mostly through the internet. Then, in 2025, live TV did something nobody expected.

THE GREAT SWITCH

Each year ACMA asks Australian adults how they watched video in the previous seven days. In 2017, 71% watched live free-to-air TV. By 2024 only 46% did.

Over the same years, online video went from a minority habit (37%) to almost universal (91%). Paid streaming services like Netflix and Stan more than doubled their reach, and YouTube jumped from 6% to 56% of adults.

The networks did not stand still. Their own free-to-air apps were used by 44% of adults each week in 2025, up from 18% in 2017. Follow the coral line on the chart: it is the networks following their viewers online.

Live TV is the only way of watching that has shrunk since 2017

% of Australian adults who used each service in the past 7 days

Hover over a line to isolate it

Source: ACMA, How we watch and listen to content; Trends and developments in viewing and listening 2024–25 (March 2026). Adults 18+.

But 2025 brought a rebound

ACMA survey of Australian adults, 2024 vs 2025

46% → 52%adults watching live free-to-air TV each week

19% → 34%18–24-year-olds watching live free-to-air TV each week

84%of adults now own a smart TV, so the antenna and the internet share one screen

Source: ACMA, How we watch and listen to content (2026)

THE COMEBACK

For the first time in years, the share of adults watching live TV went up, from 46% to 52%. The biggest jump came from the people most likely to have given up on it: 18–24-year-olds, whose weekly live viewing rose from 19% to 34% in a single year.

Part of the reason sits in the lounge room. 84% of adults now have a smart TV, and on those sets the free-to-air channels, their apps and Netflix sit side by side on the same home screen. The hero chart at the top of this page shows the result: free-to-air TV still fills 60% of the time Australians spend watching video on their TV sets.

TAKEAWAY

Television wasn't replaced; it was joined. The same screen now carries the antenna, the networks' apps and the internet.

But "Australians" is not one audience. Split the country by age, and two very different viewers appear.

CH 02 YOUNG VS OLD

Two Australias on the couch

Almost everyone still watches free-to-air TV at some point in a month. What separates the generations is how they tune in, and how long they stay.

THREE WAYS TO MEASURE A VIEWER

The official ratings, OzTAM's VOZ, count everyone who watches the free-to-air networks: through an antenna (broadcast) or through the networks' apps, also called BVOD. The three charts below look at the same people three ways: reach (did they watch at all this month?), time (how many hours?) and habit (how did they watch this week?).

Use the selector to follow one group through all three charts.

CHOOSE A GROUP ▸

Pick a group to highlight it in the heatmap, the TV-icon chart and the waffles, and see its numbers here.

Free-to-air TV still reaches most people every month

% of each group who watched at least once in an average month, Jan–Jun 2026. Darker = higher reach.

Source: OzTAM, VOZ Total TV Viewing Report H1 2026 (August 2026)

Over-55s watch six times as much as under-40s

Hours of free-to-air TV per person per month, Jan–Jun 2026

Source: OzTAM, VOZ Total TV Viewing Report H1 2026. Icons rounded to the nearest 5 hours; labels show exact totals.

Under-40s are the most likely to watch free-to-air TV only through apps

How each age group watched free-to-air TV in an average week, Jan–Jun 2026. 1 square = 1% of the group.

Source: OzTAM, VOZ Total TV Viewing Report H1 2026. Squares rounded to whole percentages.

WHAT THE THREE CHARTS SAY TOGETHER

Reach is high for everyone. Even among 16–39-year-olds, 79% watched some free-to-air TV in an average month. For 25–54-year-olds, the apps now reach almost exactly as many people as the antenna (69% vs 70%).

Time is where the generations split. Australians aged 55+ spend about 91 hours a month with free-to-air TV, roughly three hours a day. 16–39-year-olds spend about 16 hours, half an hour a day, and two in every five of those minutes come through an app. In a typical week, 43% of them don't watch free-to-air TV at all, against just 10% of over-55s.

TAKEAWAY

For older Australians, TV is a daily habit through the antenna. For younger Australians, it is something they dip into, increasingly through an app.

So when we do tune in, what are we watching, and does it depend on how we watch?

CH 03 WHAT'S ON

News on the box, drama on demand

Broadcast and apps are not just two pipes for the same shows. Australians use each one for different things.

LIVE VS ON DEMAND

News is what we watch live: almost a third of broadcast time (31.3%), and nearly all of it as it airs. Drama is what we stream: 20.7% of app minutes, more than double its share on broadcast. Reality TV such as Married at First Sight follows the same pattern (13.3% on apps vs 7.4% on broadcast).

News fills a third of broadcast time; drama leads on the apps

Block area = share of all free-to-air viewing minutes, Jan–Jun 2026. Hover a block to compare the same genre on both platforms.

Broadcast · 80.9% of minutesApps · 19.1%

Source: OzTAM, VOZ Total TV Viewing Report H1 2026 (genre share of broadcast and BVOD minutes)

TAKEAWAY

We tune in live for news and sport, and stream drama and reality when it suits us. Sport is the one genre that grew on both: from 9.6% to 13.0% of broadcast time, and from 9.1% to 16.1% of app time, reaching 18 million Australians a month.

Which brings us to the one event that still stops the country: the footy grand final.

CH 04 THE FOOTY

Footy, the last campfire

Live sport is the one thing that still gets millions of Australians watching the same screen at the same moment. But which code you watch depends on where you live.

A TEN-YEAR HIGH

In 2026 the AFL Grand Final between Brisbane and Fremantle drew an average of 4.52 million viewers on Seven, the biggest audience in the decade shown, and well above the 2019 low of 2.94 million.

Streaming is no longer a sideshow. 1.42 million people watched on the 7plus app, 31% of the audience, nearly double the share of 2024. A week later the NRL Grand Final, a one-point win for the Roosters over Newcastle, averaged 4.29 million on Nine and reached 6.05 million people.

The AFL Grand Final hit a ten-year high, and almost a third streamed it

Average national audience (millions): total and watched on the 7plus app

Sources: Seven Network via TV Blackbox (2026); Mediaweek (2025). Measurement methods changed over the decade.

THE FOOTY DIVIDE

Australians joke about the Barassi Line, an imaginary border between rugby-league country in New South Wales and Queensland and Aussie-rules country everywhere else. Grand final audiences in the five capital-city TV markets show it is very real.

The left map shows how many people watched each final. The right map turns that into a ratio, so cities of different sizes can be compared fairly.

CHOOSE A CITY ▸

Pick a city to highlight it on both maps and compare its audiences.

Melbourne watched the AFL; Sydney watched the NRL

Average audience per capital-city market, 2026 Grand Finals. Circle area = viewers.

Sources: TV Blackbox (AFL); Nine Network (NRL), 2026

Brisbane is the swing city

Of capital-city viewers who watched either final, the share who watched the AFL. Each state is shaded by its capital.

Market populations: OzTAM universe estimates 2026. Projection: Albers equal-area conic. Boundaries: Natural Earth.

Melbourne (1.26 million) and Sydney (1.16 million) each delivered the biggest audience for "their" code, and largely ignored the other. Perth and Adelaide preferred the AFL by three or four to one.

Brisbane is the exception. Even with the Brisbane Lions playing in the AFL decider, more Brisbane viewers watched the NRL (737,000 vs 581,000). Hometown teams matter: the Dockers lifted Perth to 26 viewers per 100 residents, the highest rate of any city, and the Knights drew 480,000 viewers in the Northern NSW market alone.

TAKEAWAY

Live sport is free-to-air TV's strongest card, and more of it is now streamed. But Australia doesn't share one grand final: it shares two, split along a line on the map.

Sport is made live. Drama has to be paid for in advance. So who is paying?

CH 05 MADE HERE

Who pays for Aussie drama?

When we stream drama, we are often watching Australian stories. Making them is changing fast: fewer hours, bigger budgets, and a new centre of production.

FEWER HOURS, BIGGER BUDGETS

Screen Australia counts every Australian drama made each year. In 2024/25, free-to-air networks made fewer hours of new drama (191, down from 276) and spent less ($162 million).

Subscription and streaming services also made fewer hours (105) but spent more: $492 million, about $4.7 million for every hour of screen time, against about $0.85 million on free-to-air. The dashed lines on the chart mark cost per hour, so the steeper the line a point sits on, the more expensive each hour.

Streaming makes fewer hours, at five times the cost per hour

Australian TV drama: hours made vs $ spent, 2023/24 → 2024/25 (arrow shows the change)

Source: Screen Australia, Drama Report 2024/25. Excludes children's drama. Financial years run July–June.

Industry pays almost half; government a third

Where the $749m that financed Australian TV and streaming drama in 2024/25 came from

Source: Screen Australia, Drama Report 2024/25. Government parts sum to $248m because of rounding.

FOLLOWING THE MONEY

Of the $749 million invested in Australian TV and streaming dramas in 2024/25, 46% came from the Australian screen industry itself: broadcasters, streamers and production companies.

Government provided 34%, mostly through the Producer Offset, a federal tax rebate ($180m), with state screen agencies adding $44m and Screen Australia $19m. A further 21% came from overseas investors.

Queensland overtook New South Wales as the production capital

Each state's share of all screen-drama production spending (TV and film). Untick the box to show 2024/25 on its own.

Source: Screen Australia, Drama Report 2024/25. ACT, NT and Tasmania are only reported together (drawn at Hobart).

$2.7brecord drama spend in Australia, 2024/25, boosted by big international shoots

16% → 34%Queensland's share in one year

51% → 31%New South Wales' share

TAKEAWAY

Streaming services now account for three-quarters of the money spent making Australian TV drama, and more of it is being made in Queensland.

END OF TRANSMISSION

Not dead. Re-wired.

So, is television dead? The data says no. Free-to-air TV still reaches 87% of Australians in an average month, live viewing rose in 2025, and the biggest sporting nights are getting bigger.

What has changed is the route in: the same programs now arrive through an antenna, an app or a streaming service, and younger Australians increasingly choose the app.

The money has moved with them. Streaming services now pay for most new Australian drama, and the stories we watch are increasingly made in Queensland. The next time you switch on, notice which way you came in.

A packed Melbourne Cricket Ground during the 2022 AFL Grand Final — Still watching together: the MCG on Grand Final day

A rooftop UHF and VHF television antenna against the sky — The old way in

A TV remote control with a dedicated Netflix button — The new way in

Photos: Wikimedia Commons (MCG, antenna, remote); authors and licences on each file page.

We still watch together87% of Australians watch free-to-air TV each month, and 4.52 million watched the AFL Grand Final.

The way in is changing1 in 5 free-to-air minutes is streamed; for under-40s it is 2 in 5.

Streaming pays the bills$492m on Australian drama in 2024/25, three times free-to-air.