Nielsen: Viewers watching video content all over the place
Survey company releases study on video consumption during the third quarter of 2009. Surprisingly, 99 percent of viewers still use a TV to watch shows.
For a while, some believed that the Web and social networks would limit the amount of time people spend consuming video content. But Nielsen's latest A2/M2 Three Screen Report has found that people are actually consuming content on more platforms, thanks to digital video recorders and the Web.
According to the report, which looks at content viewing on television, the Web, and several other platforms, online-video viewing was up a whopping 34.9 percent in the third quarter. DVR use was up 21.1 percent, the study found. Surprisingly, 99 percent of video content that's watched in the U.S. is done on a television. So, while Web use is on the rise, it still has a long way to go before the television is supplanted as the "go-to" for consuming video content.
Nielsen also looked at how much time the average American spends consuming video content on their TVs, from the Web, or via mobile devices. The company found that the average person watched 31 hours of television per week during the third quarter of 2009. Just 31 of those minutes were spent in playback mode on their DVRs.
Web use, while higher than it has been, was still much lower than television use. Nielsen said that the average consumer spent four hours on the Internet during the third quarter. That user watched an average of 22 minutes of online video per week. Meanwhile, mobile-video consumption was lagging far behind in the third quarter, accounting for just 3 minutes per week of the user's time. Unsurprising to some, teens watched the most video content on their mobile phones, averaging seven hours of mobile-video consumption per month.
A few other interesting tidbits of information: TV viewing followed closely with age. Those aged 65 and older watched an average of 43 hours of television each week, while the average person between the ages of 18 and 24 watched 22 hours of television each week. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 watched the most video content online, averaging 35 minutes per week.
Click here to see the full Nielsen study.