[Editor's Note: This article has been updated with Q3 2012 data and trend analysis.] There’s a strong perception that with the rise of social media, mobile device usage, and other such digital trends, youth have put TV on mute. According to the latest cross-platform report [download page] from Nielsen, young people are indeed watching less TV, but it’s not a seismic shift, yet. The 18-24 group, for instance, watched a weekly average of about 22 hours of traditional TV in Q3 2012, about 2 hours less than they did in Q3 2011. That’s about 17 minutes less per day.The trend does appear to be moving towards less TV viewing by this group, though. That 17 minutes per day difference year-over-year in Q3 is up from a 15 minute difference in Q2, and a 13 minute gap in Q1.
Whereas in Q2 2012, all age groups were watching a bit less TV than the prior year, the same was not true in Q3. The 50-64 and 65+ groups both watched a bit more TV in Q3 2012 than in Q3 2011, while the 35-49 crowd spent almost exactly the same time. And although 25-34-year-olds watched about half an hour less TV in Q3 2012 than in Q3 2011, that’s down from a gap of about 1 hour in Q2.
So while the Q2 data suggested there wasn’t a generational aspect at play, the latest quarter of data (Q3) suggests that younger adults may be moving away from traditional TV viewing at a faster rate than older viewers. That would not be a terribly surprising result, given that younger adults have adopted internet and mobile video at a greater rate than their more mature counterparts.
It’s worth noting, though, that the above figures are averaged among the entire population. When looking just at persons in TV households, the shift is similar, though slightly less pronounced. That is, on a monthly basis, 18-24 TV viewers watched about 7 hours and 40 minutes less in Q3 2012 than they did a year earlier. That translates to roughly 15 minutes less per day.
Looking at other age groups, 18-49 viewers watched about 40 minutes less TV per month in Q3 2012 than in Q3 2011, the 25-54 demo watched about 7 hours more, and the 55+ group spent about 4 hours and 20 minutes more time watching TV.
It’s Too Soon to Claim the King Has Been Dethroned
It’s true that TV’s audience has declined – by 1.1% year-over-year in Q3, down from a 1.7% drop in Q2 – while the number of mobile subscribers watching video on a mobile device has grown by 22.5%. But it’s too early to pronounce the demise of traditional TV viewing.
Here’s why: in Q3, 18-24-year-olds may have watched less TV on a weekly basis, but they still watched about 22 hours. How much time did they spend watching video on the internet or on a mobile phone, combined? About 2 hours and 15 minutes.
Still, there’s no avoiding the rise of online viewing. That 2 hours and 15 minutes represents significant growth from 1 hour and 45 minutes in Q2 2012, and from roughly 1 hour in Q3 2011. The same increase is apparent for 25-34-year-olds, who spent almost 2 hours watching video on the internet or a mobile phone in Q3, up from 68 minutes a year earlier.
So while traditional TV still remains by far the dominant viewing medium for youth, there is certainly movement on the digital side of the equation.
How Much Does Streaming Affect TV Habits?
The Nielsen reports also look at how streaming behavior correlates with average daily minutes spent with TV. As Nielsen has found for some time now, there is a negative correlation between streaming and TV viewing. That is, in Q3, as in earlier quarters, those who streamed the most (the top quintile streamed about 24 minutes a day), watched the least TV (about 243 minutes). Again, though, the comparison is illuminating. The top quintile of streamers watch 24 minutes per day. They spend about 10 times that amount of time watching TV. (Both figures were up in Q3 compared to Q2, likely for seasonal reasons.)
Also, the numbers don’t show that people watching the least TV are streaming far more. For example, the top quintile of TV viewers watched more than 10 hours of TV in Q2, while the bottom quintile watched about 36 minutes. But that bottom quintile only streamed for roughly 5 minutes a day, compared to about 3 minutes for the top quintile of TV viewers – a marginal difference at best.
Services like Netflix might be putting a dent in TV viewing behavior, though. In its Q2 report [download page], Nielsen looked at the media consumption behavior of Netflix users compared to those who don’t use the service. The report found that on average, while Netflix users consume the same amount of media as non-Netflix users, they spend half an hour less per day watching TV, making that time up spending 15 minutes more time with video game consoles, 8 minutes more with DVD/Blu-ray playback, and 8 minutes more on streaming. These findings contrast with September 2012 survey results from GfK, which found regular Netflix users saying their TV content consumption was unaffected.
Cable Loses Subscribers, But Not to the Internet
Another topic of interest is cord-cutting – in which consumers stop paying for TV services and instead find programming online. Estimates have varied significantly on the extent to which this is occurring.
Nielsen’s Q3 report shows that the number of households with a cable subscription declined by roughly 2.7 million year-over-year in Q3 2012, or by about 4.4%, consistent with the year-over-year percentage decline seen in Q2. But those households didn’t become broadcast-only households who may be watching online. In fact, the number of broadcast-only households only grew by 67,000. Instead, telco picked up more than 1 million households, and satellite another 124,000. While broadcast-only households with broadband (those most likely to be replacing their pay TV subscriptions with online viewing) did grow, the number only increased by about 150,000 (down from a roughly 200,000 increase in Q2), hardly enough to offset the decline in cable subscribers. This suggests that the decline in cable TV subscribers isn’t necessarily driven by the availability of online content.
Other Findings:
- According to the Nielsen report, women aged 50 and older watched the most TV again in Q3, at more than 205 hours per month.
- Looking at ethnicity and race, African-Americans continued to consume the most TV on a monthly basis, more than double the amount of time spent by Asians, who spent the least amount of time watching TV (206:36 v. 96:13).
- Viewers aged 18-34 made up 18% of the traditional TV audience, 28% of the internet video audience, and 52% of the mobile video viewing population.