Update 01Mar09: This study have been superseded by a newer survey on the hours americans spend watching TV

How much time do you spend watching TV each day?

I can’t say I was surprised by the partial results of a study being conducted by Cisco and the Center for the Digital Future of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication (whew!) that aims to track people’s “video behaviors and attitudes on a global scale”. The study is merely in its first phase but the results indicate that the United States of America wins over China, Germany and Sweden when it comes to how long they watch TV per day.

In a survey of 1,000 respondents each per country, Americans with televisions (about 99% of respondents) watch an average of about 3.8 hours a day which is well ahead of the Germans’ 2.9 hours, the Swedes’ 2.1 hours and the urban Chinese’s 1.8 hours.

The survey also looked into the habits of the respondents when it comes to watching video content through other sources besides the TV. It turns out, the Chinese is King when it comes to watching online video using their personal computers (PC) with 97% of the respondents doing so on a regular basis. The US follows with 81% of respondents saying they watch online videos through computers.

Germans, on the other hand, are more interested in watching internet video through their TV sets with 85% saying so in the survey. The Swedes comes second at 55% of respondents, 54% of Americans and 35% of the urban Chinese.

I personally watch only about 1-2 hours of TV, online video, DVDs everyday on the average and maybe even less but that’s just because I force myself to watch less because I want to get more work done. The report includes more details about how much these countries watch video content on their mobile phones. The United States tops this one as well because for those respondents who do watch video through mobile phones (about 23%), they spend about 36 minutes doing so. I’m personally not a fan of mobile phone videos because of poor quality and relative cost.

If you wish to see the survey report you may get it at Cisco’s website.

BTW, I just finished watching the last episode of Dexter season 3 which is currently my favorite. I will be posting more about this at a future time.

Thanks for reading. Keep watching TV!