151 hours of TV-watching every month!

How long does the average American watch TV per day?

Well, yes the answer came before the question. This is the latest TV watching statistics on how much television Americans are watching and I just read it from a Los Angeles Times report about the most recent survey that was conducted by Nielsen, Co.

One hundred and fifty one hours— that’s 5 hours a day of TV on the average for the last quarter of the year 2008, which was  up 3.8% from 145 hours average from 4th quarter of 2007 the survey said.

This finding was way higher than the figure of 3.8 hours per day or a measly 120 hours per month TV watching by Americans that reported by another research firm last year.

They (Nielsen and LA Times) explain the increase in average time by citing the rising interest of people in the US presidential elections and the winter season. They also cited the findings that there is an apparent increase in the number of television units people are putting into their homes which is giving every household member easier access to TV entertainment which Americans seem to be needing more of these days.

“The timing of a lot of things has converged, what with the winter coming on, the darker nights, less money to go around and people entertaining at home more,” said Susan Bandura, director of strategy at San Francisco advertising agency Hoffman/Lewis.

Also contributing to the increase are the steady growth in TV programming and the number of TVs in households, Nielsen spokesman Gary Holmes said. The average U.S. household now contains more televisions than people, which means that family members or roommates can watch their favorite shows alone.

“Everyone has their own niche show they want to watch,” he said.

Furthermore, the increase in people watching TV on internet and other media like Tivos, mobile phones, etc. Teenagers are contributing in a major way to the increase in TV because they spend about 6.2 hours watching video content on the go through their mobile phones. One surprising finding in the survey concludes that senior American citizens actually watch the most indicating a trend with respect to age.

…Teenagers (12 to 17) spend 103 hours watching TV a month, whereas senior citizens (65 and older) spend 207 hours. That’s about seven hours a day — enough for two baseball games.

Read more about the TV-watching survey report.

When it comes to TV-watching, America tops ’em all!

Update 01Mar09: This study have been superseded by a newer survey on the hours americans spend watching TV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