TV is the most heavily consumed platform among US adults of all ages, according to Nielsen's Q1 2016 Comparable Metrics report, released last Friday. This held true across all age groups, including the 18-34 group. It is especially true of adults 50+, who spent 47 hours and 18 minutes a week watching TV, considerably higher than the US adult average of 35 hours and 26 minutes.
However, among 18-34s the average time spent was lower, at 20 hours and 24 minutes. Interestingly, the study found that this age group spent the least time with media overall (across TV, smartphones, tablets, PCs, TV-connected devices and radio).
Regarding video, Nielsen found that 213.5 million people in the US watched a total of 516.7 billion "Gross Minutes" of TV, at an average of 397 minutes per day in the first quarter of this year. This compared with 77.7 million people who streamed video to a PC for a total of 26.4 billion minutes, 110 million people who watched video on a smartphone for a total of 5.6 billion minutes, and 46.9 million users who watched 4.6 billion minutes of video on a tablet.
The number of TV viewers has grown in the last year, though the total-minutes figure remained almost the same. This suggests that the average time spent by an individual TV viewer is declining. The opposite was true of the PC, where the number of video users declined but the number of minutes increased. Phones and tablets are being used to view video by more people this year, and the number of minutes spent viewing video has increased as well.
A hundred and one million users also spent 53 billion minutes with TV-connected devices (including DVD players, gaming consoles and other multimedia devices) this quarter, but Nielsen doesn't break out how much of that was spent watching video, or what percentage of these devices were Internet connected.
The dominance of TV is clear in terms of time spent, where it dwarfs total minutes spent on any other device. The Nielsen report again underscores how the impact of online video is still nascent in the larger picture of media consumption, even though the decline of traditional TV has begun.
It is also consistent with the trends in the UK highlighted by Ofcom and other research, in that 18-34s were most likely to be shifting away from traditional TV and towards newer, Internet-connected devices such as smartphones. But it does seem that the TV is far from dead. (See UK Under-25s Are Guzzling VoD, Finds Ofcom).
— Aditya Kishore, Practice Leader, Video Transformation, Telco Transformation