Attest: social video new TV, YouTube rivals live TV analysis

The remote control did not disappear. It got demoted by the rectangle already in your hand. According to MarketingWeek’s summary of Attest’s 2026 UK Media Consumption Report, YouTube now nearly matches live TV for daily viewing time in the UK, at 1h 16m versus 1h 18m. Even more telling, creator platforms now claim three hours and eight minutes of the average British day, which is less a media trend and more a hostile takeover of the sofa.

What Attest’s report actually says, according to MarketingWeek

MarketingWeek reports that Attest frames social video as the new TV, with social video overall outpacing live and streamed TV combined. Translation for creators: the living room is no longer the only place where television behavior happens. People still sit down to be entertained, informed, distracted and nudged toward things to buy, but the schedule is now assembled by feeds, recommendations and creators rather than channel controllers. For brands, the lazy read is to move TV money into short video and call it a strategy. Please do not do that. The better read is that formats built for creator platforms need their own pacing, proof points and follow-up paths, because the audience is not passively waiting for the ad break. They are watching, searching, swiping and comparing, often before the polished campaign has finished its first line.

The second screen is now part of the main event,

according to Attest and We Are Social UK MarketingWeek’s Attest report preview also flags a second-screen opportunity around what 69% of viewers are doing on their phones while watching TV. That is the part media plans used to treat as leakage, like attention slipping out of a bucket. In 2026, it looks more like the operating system for attention: the TV creates the spark, the phone catches the intent, and the creator clip makes it feel native to the feed. We Are Social UK, in collaboration with Meltwater, says its Digital 2026: The United Kingdom report counts 68.1 million individuals using the internet and 55.5 million social media user identities in the UK. It also reports that UK social media users spend 16h 13m weekly on social channels and use an average of 6.2 platforms each month. Almost half of UK adult internet users, 49.3%, use social media to find information about products, while 38.7% use social channels to learn about brands and find their content, according to We Are Social UK. That means the creator platform is not just where the awareness clip lives. It is where the follow-up question, the product check, the peer review and the vibe audit happen. A TV spot without a creator-platform landing pattern now feels like posting a flyer and forgetting the address.

Creators get scale, but also landlord risk,

according to Mintel Mintel’s UK Social Media: Content Creators Market Report 2026 says influencer fatigue hangs over the sector as consumers get tired of being constantly sold to. That is the tiny cursed footnote under every attention boom. When platforms become the new TV, they also inherit TV’s oldest problem: too much selling, not enough reason to care. Mintel points to in-depth posts and smaller-brand partnerships as opportunities for creators in a more saturated market. That is a useful corrective to the feed-brained instinct that every clip must be shorter, louder and optimized to within an inch of its life. If creator platforms are carrying three hours and eight minutes of the average British day, the winners will not only be the people who can grab attention, but the people who can hold trust through explanation, taste and consistency. Here is the platform-skeptic part, because someone has to keep the receipt folder organized. When platforms become central to viewing habits, they also become central toll booths. Creators should treat this report as leverage in sponsorship conversations, but not as a reason to depend on one recommendation system, one format, or one payout model that can be rearranged during a product meeting nobody invited them to.

Search is shifting around video,

according to Attest MarketingWeek says Attest’s report also frames social video as, for younger generations, a new route to search behavior, while AI search adoption skews heavily toward high earners at £100k+ and Google maintains standard search dominance. That is not the death of search. It is search getting messier, more visual and more personality-driven, with different habits depending on income, age and context. Attest’s separate Gen Z media consumption research, based on 1,000 US Gen Z adults aged 18 to 27, found that 43% watch 2+ hours daily on video sharing platforms, while just 5% watch none. The same Attest research says 38% watch no live TV. The geography is different, but the cultural direction rhymes: video platforms are becoming the default interface for curiosity, entertainment and decision-making. The practical move now is not to declare TV dead, because zombie formats love proving us wrong. It is to plan for handoffs: TV to phone, creator clip to search, social video to product page, short-form hook to longer proof. Watch whether media buyers start treating creator platforms as core inventory rather than garnish, and whether platforms respond with better tools for creators or simply more ways to rent access to the audience creators helped gather. My read: attention has already moved, and the smartest players will stop asking whether social video counts as TV and start asking who gets paid when it does.