As more consumers work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, multicultural viewers are leading the trend toward an increase in streaming service subscriptions, according to a new Nielsen Total Audience Report for second quarter 2020.

According to Nielsen, 25% of all viewers have added at least one streaming service in the past three months, with 40% of Hispanic viewers adding at least one new streaming service to top all groups. Black viewers were second at 27% followed by white viewers at 25%. The recent debuts of HBO Max, Peacock and Quibi should continue to propel increases in streaming service subscriptions among all viewers throughout the rest of the year. 

Nielsen also reported that viewing from streaming services comprised one-fourth of all television minutes viewed during the quarter, up from 19% of TV usage in fourth quarter 2019.

“COVID-19 has catapulted streaming to become the present and future of content creation,” said Peter Katsingris, Nielsen senior VP of audience insights. “Today, it accounts for 25% of our collective time spent with the television among streaming capable homes.”

As streaming viewership increases, live TV viewing dropped to 3 hours and 43 minutes per day in the first quarter, down from 3:53 a year ago and 4:10 two years ago, according to Nielsen. Among multicultural groups, Black Americans watched 20 minutes less time per day of live and time shifted TV a day during the quarter, with Hispanics down nine minutes and Asian Americans down two minutes.

Black adults still spent nearly 50 hours a week viewing television during the first quarter 2020, dwarfing whites (37:50), Hispanics (28:27) and Asian Americans (22:38), according to the report. 

Multicultural viewers have always been cable’s most loyal customers, even in the midst of the growing popularity of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

A new Horowitz Associates report, however, shows that urban multicultural viewers are quickly migrating to digital platforms to consume video content.

Horowitz’s “State of Cable & Digital Media: Multicultural Edition 2015” reports that 51% of Hispanic viewers, 46% of Asian viewers and 45% of black viewers spend more than 20% of their total TV viewing time watching OTT services, compared with only 39% of white viewers.

Plus, more than 88% of urban multicultural TV viewers have the ability to stream video content to a computer, mobile device or directly to a TV.

“Multicultural consumers have always paved the way for new technology, especially when it comes to television and entertainment,” Adriana Waterston, Horowitz’s senior vice president of Insights & Strategy, said.

The report comes as a recent Nielsen Total Audience Report showed that traditional TV viewing is down among multicultural viewers. For example, while African-Americans continue to watch far more broadcast and cable TV than any other group, monthly viewership among African-Americans was down by 12 hours in the first quarter compared with Q1 2014, Nielsen officials said.

Viewership is also down by five hours among Hispanic viewers and by three hours among Asian viewers in the same time period, according to Nielsen.

The silver lining for cable is that 85% of multicultural viewers surveyed by Horowitz still subscribe to a multichannel service, which gives cable and broadcast networks the chance to deliver content that reflects and showcases images of and stories about people of color. The 2014-15 TV season produced arguably the most multicultural-themed dramas, comedies and original movies in a generation.

With a few exceptions, the streaming services have been slow to develop original programming featuring predominately multicultural casts or actors of color in lead roles. As the U.S. population continues to become more diverse, the platforms that provide the content and services that multicultural viewers seek will ultimately garner the lion’s share of their viewing time and monthly subscription dollars.