The end of the year is one of the busiest times in terms of TV viewing. Fairy tales are the most popular programmes and free-to-air stations are the most visited ones, with up to 94 per cent of people watching them. However, roughly one in three Czechs watches a film or TV series that they download illegally on their days off.

That is the finding of a survey conducted by Axocom on TV habits and routines at the end of the year. “Interestingly enough, even those who do not have a TV set at home watch TV during the holidays. In fact, TV often runs as a backdrop during visits, so almost everyone actually gets to watch it,” says the company’s director Erika Luzsicza

Although streaming services are on the rise globally, their viewers are definitely in the minority in the Czech Republic. According to a recent survey, only four per cent of respondents watch Netflix or Amazon shows, while at least 15 per cent of people choose from pay-TV offerings.

“The share of pay-TV viewers has been growing for a long time, but slowly as opposed to other markets. Compared to other Eastern European countries, the Czech Republic still has the largest share of terrestrial broadcasting, accounting for more than half of the population,” Luzsicza explains.

Most surprisingly, as many as one-third of all respondents admitted in the survey that they had downloaded illegally obtained content from free available servers. Unlike nostalgists, they want to catch up on what they missed during the holidays in order to keep track of what is going on and keep up with people around them, often committing piracy as a result.

Source: idnes.cz