Nielsen: TV Viewing Hits Record High

Written by Steve Donohue

Tuesday, November 25. 2008 at 03:45 PM EST 5 comments

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Americans are spending more time surfing the Web and using mobile phones to check out video, but that's not cutting into the number of hours they spend watching TV.

The average person in the United States spent 142 hours watching TV in the third quarter, Nielsen reported Tuesday. It found that the average U.S. home used a TV for 8 hours and 18 minutes per day in the 2007-2008 TV season, the highest record since Nielsen began measuring TV viewing in the 1950s.

The record amount of TV viewing comes as the average person surfing the Web spends 27 hours monthly on the Internet, and the average mobile phone subscriber watches three hours per month of mobile video.

With Comcast, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV and other pay TV providers marketing digital video recorders, the amount of time viewers (persons aged 2-plus) spend each month watching time-shifted programming increased to 6 minutes and 32 seconds, Nielsen said.

Not surprisingly, older viewers are spending more time watching TV, while younger viewers are spending the most time watching video on the Internet. During the third quarter, the average adult ages 18 to 24 watched 3 minutes and 57 seconds of video on the Internet and more than 106 hours of traditional TV, Nielsen said.

Adults ages 65-plus watched the most TV -- more than 196 hours per month, and the least amount of video on the Internet (1:07), Nielsen added.

The increased number of big live events on the Web is helping drive increased viewing of Internet videos. In the third quarter alone, Web surfers had access to online video from the summer Olympics in Beijing, the political conventions, Major League Baseball, and coverage of the financial crisis, Nielsen noted in the report.