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You Are Still Watching a Staggering Amount Of TV Every Day (recode.net)

Posted by msmash on from the love-hate-relationship-with-TV dept.

Peter Kafka, reporting for Recode:TV! It's cooked! Toast! Doneso. Ready for the fork. Except not yet, because Americans are still watching a ton of TV, every day. For some of them, it's the equivalent of a full-time job. The average American watches an astonishing 4.5 hours of TV a day, according to a new report from Nielsen. Add in DVR time, and that number gets up to 5 hours a day. That usage is shrinking over time -- a couple of years ago, Americans were averaging five hours and twenty-three minutes a day.Nielsen's data also shows that people are now consuming more content on their smartphone devices than ever. Compared to just 47 minutes usage in 2014, it is now up to one hour and 39 minutes.

4 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. DEC Tag? by FunkSoulBrother · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What the heck does this have to do with the Digital Equipment Corporation?

  2. Re:4.5 hours a day? That's really sad. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If I'm lucky, I have enough downtime to actually sit and watch a whole hour a day, and that's while I'm eating dinner. If I didn't have a DVR, it wouldn't even be that much. Where is it that anyone these days hase 4.5 hours of free time to sit in front of a television?

    For me to average even an hour a night would take some planning in itself. I've read before that these numbers are seriously skewed by the elderly (especially in nursing homes), hospital rooms, and the unemployed. If these groups were compensated for I wonder what the average would truly be.

  3. Re:4.5 hours a day? That's really sad. by Howitzer86 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    TV, YouTube, whatever. I watch plenty and I'm no better.

    I do pay taxes though, I'm just not an executive at work nor a patriarch of a large family, so I can just do whatever after work. Tonight I'm writing the second half of a presentation for a local game dev enthusiast group that meets up once a month. Other times I spend it drawing, writing, 3d modeling, or programming. In any case, it's important to me that I have this time, because I can use it to grow and maintain my skills no matter what I do at work, or just relax if I need to. You know, normal well-adjusted human stuff.

  4. Re:4.5 hours a day? That's really sad. by MitchDev · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do they count "Doing something else but have the TV on in the background"?