Written by Television is America’s No. 1 pastime, with an average of four hours and 39 minutes consumed by every person every day. But more and more young people are tuning in elsewhere.
Americans ages 12 to 34 are spending less time in front of TV sets, even as those 35 and older are spending more, according to new research released by Nielsen.
The divide along a demographic line reveals the effect of Internet videos, social networks, mobile phones and video games — in short, all the alternatives to the television set that are taking up growing slices of the American attention span. Young people are still watching the same shows, but they are streaming them on computers and phones to a greater degree than their parents or grandparents do.
It has long been predicted that these new media would challenge traditional television viewing, but this is the first significant evidence to emerge in research data. If the trends hold, the long-term implications for the media industry are huge, possibly causing billions of dollars in annual advertising spending to shift away from old-fashioned TV.
The television industry has been expecting — and dreading the day — that TV viewing peaks, and then either plateaus or slowly declines in the face of encroaching Internet and phone use. According to Nielsen, television viewing as a whole is steady, in part because older Americans — particularly those over the age of 65 — are watching more than ever before. Digital video recorders deserve some of the credit for the uptick, since they let people stockpile shows.
But for three straight quarters, there have been declines in viewing among Americans under 35, even when DVR viewership is factored in.
Adults ages 25 to 34, for instance, watched about four and a half fewer hours of television in the third quarter of 2011 than at the same time in 2010 — the equivalent of about nine minutes a day. Viewers ages 12 to 17 also watched about nine fewer minutes a day. The demographic in between, those ages 18 to 24, watched about six fewer minutes a day.
As behaviors shift, there is likely to be a scramble to identify winners and losers. Viacom, the owner of Nickelodeon, criticized Nielsen last fall after ratings showed that the channel suffered from a sudden drop in children’s viewing.
According to data for the first nine months of 2011, children spent as much time in front of the television set as they did in 2010, and in some cases spent more. But the proportion of live viewing is shrinking while time-shifted viewing is expanding.
Zach Dulli, a director of operations for the National Council for Geographic Education in Washington, has noticed that his children, Max and Huck, like the TV set, but they like laptops and cellphones more. Now that Huck has mastered the finger swipe to turn on an iPad, Mr. Dulli and his wife, Stephanie, prepare “Baby Einstein” for him to watch on the device. Huck is eight months old.
“To us, TV is separate from the other media we use,” Mr. Dulli said. “To my sons, it’s not.”
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