There is a new Nielsen study about
TV, Internet and Mobile Usage Among Americans. There are two really points in this report to me. The first is a surprise in how little time people are watching time shifted programs. If 35% of people have I would expect more that 5% of viewership to be timeshifted. When I worked at TiVo we conducted studies saying that TiVo owners timeshifted a lot more of their programs than the people with a cable company DVR.
I am not surprised that people are watching so little television on the internet and on mobile devices. Even with big jumps, the numbers are small compared to how many people are watching TV. Every group watches more TV than internet video. Even under 35 is watching a lot of television. Even the age group 12-17 is watching almost 90 hours a week. This goes against conventional wisdom, but it is the truth. It is sexy to think that
broadcast television is a dinosaur and will be gone soon. From these numbers I do not expect this to be true. Television is going to be around for a long time. I think it will be longer than ten years. I think content companies will not be willing to kill broadcast television while they can still make money with it.
Labels: DVR, Nielsen, rating, television, TiVo, web video
