Concerts, television and newspapers still popular in the Netherlands

The media use in the Netherlands is gradually shifting along with the rise of online media services like Netflix, but traditional forms of entertainment and media consumption like television and newspaper are still most popular, according social and cultural planning office SCP. Concerts even attracted a record number of visitors last year, Statistics Netherlands reported. 

The shift from watching television to streaming is most visible among young people and the highly educated, according to the SCP's report Trends in Media. In 2013 people in the Netherlands on average streamed 10 minutes of images a day. Last year it was almost 30 minutes.

Despite the increase in streaming, people in the Netherlands are not en masse embracing all the new possibilities of the changing media landscape. Smartphones and tablets make it possible to use media more outside the house, but the SCP found that people mainly use media at home. Netherlands residents still mainly read on paper, watch television programs at time of broadcast, and listen to fixed radio channels. 

"Moreover, the time at which Dutch people use media has not changed either", SCP said. "People mainly read in the morning, listen during the day, watch in the evening, and read late in the evening."

Concerts are also still very popular in the Netherlands, according to Statistics Netherlands. Last year classical concerts and pop concerts on Dutch professional stages attracted nearly 9.7 million visitors, a 6 percent increase compared to 2017 and a new record. Pop concerts were by far the most popular, attracting 80 percent of all visitors. The number of concerts also increased by 500 or 16 percent to 3,800.