Slashdot Mirror
When Did TV Watching Peak? (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader writes: With Netflix and Amazon Prime, Facebook Video and YouTube, it's tempting to imagine that the tech industry destroyed TV. The world is more than 25 years into the web era, after all, more than half of American households have had home Internet for 15 years, and the current smartphone paradigm began more than a decade ago. But no. Americans still watch an absolutely astounding amount of traditional television.
In fact, television viewing didn't peak until 2009-2010, when the average American household watched 8 hours and 55 minutes of TV per day. And the '00s saw the greatest growth in TV viewing time of any decade since Nielsen began keeping track in 1949-1950: Americans watched 1 hour and 23 minutes more television at the end of the decade than at the beginning. Run the numbers and you'll find that 32 percent of the increase in viewing time from the birth of television to its peak occurred in the first years of the 21st century.
Over the last 8 years, all the new, non-TV things -- Facebook, phones, YouTube, Netflix -- have only cut about an hour per day from the dizzying amount of TV that the average household watches. Americans are still watching more than 7 hours and 50 minutes per household per day.
In fact, television viewing didn't peak until 2009-2010, when the average American household watched 8 hours and 55 minutes of TV per day. And the '00s saw the greatest growth in TV viewing time of any decade since Nielsen began keeping track in 1949-1950: Americans watched 1 hour and 23 minutes more television at the end of the decade than at the beginning. Run the numbers and you'll find that 32 percent of the increase in viewing time from the birth of television to its peak occurred in the first years of the 21st century.
Over the last 8 years, all the new, non-TV things -- Facebook, phones, YouTube, Netflix -- have only cut about an hour per day from the dizzying amount of TV that the average household watches. Americans are still watching more than 7 hours and 50 minutes per household per day.
"...watching more than 7 hours and 50 minutes per household per day"
I suspect people aren't "watching" as much as just leaving a TV playing in the background. To Nielsen, they would appear as the same thing.
Whether it's "TV" or a tablet or a phone or whatever, most people I know watch a shocking amount of entertainment on their screens.
I don't respond to AC's.
... but it's dreck that's by and large built by professionals and and as expertly aimed as possible at likely consumers. Combine that with a LOT of bored people and you get a pretty large market. And sometimes the content can have some good stuff mixed in with the bad.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Are people really watching 8hrs a day or is the TV simply on? We leave ours on all of the time when not at home because the dogs like hearing the voices and they don't misbehave.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That could be broken down into a bunch of different things.
2hrs of TV for the kids, 2hrs for mom, 2hrs for dad. 4hrs on 2 different screens at the same time. It does not mean the entire family sits in front of the tv or 8hrs a day.
Another part of this may be people turning their TV off and leaving the cable box on. Newer cable TV boxes can use HDMI-CEC and know if the TV is off, but millions of cable boxes don't support CEC. I read that Neilson is relying much more heavily now on data from cable boxes than diaries.
Its for the _household_. If your kid watches an hour of cartoons, and then at night you watch an hour of scifi, thats 2 hours.
Don't think. Watch.
TV from back when it was worth watching.
And if I watch 20 minutes and then turn off the TV but not the cable box, how many hours is that? Comcast doesn't know I turned off my TV.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Americans are still watching more than 7 hours and 50 minutes per household per day.
FFS I didn't even watch that much the last time I was unemployed. People need to cut the other cord: the power cord to the TV, and GO OUTSIDE.
24 hours a day - 8 hours of work/school - 8 hours of sleep = 8 hours remaining. So every waking moment that is not at work or asleep is spent watching TV??? On average?
So that means a significant portion are spending >8 hours a day! And it means the "average" American does absolutely no other thing with their day. No eating, no travel, no video games, no gardening, no soccer games, no taking out the trash. This doesn't seem believable. Even kids spend 8 hours schooling if you include travel to school and homework and the chorus concert.
What am I missing?
Now.. I am not saying that all programing is shit, but the mode of consumption is total shit.
The amount of advert you watch for a 30 min program is nuts.
The UK is shockingly bad about this. I would say you get about 17 min of actual program per 30 min, the rest is loud and obnoxious adverts.
Why would anyone actually pay money to suffer that crap?
Not to mention that the monthly fees for TV in the US is stupidly high. When I was last living there, we paid 120 per month for TV plus internet. We ended up dropping TV but still needed to pay 70 per month for internet.
Nice that they are now allowed to kill your netflix speed even though you give those asshats almost 1k a year.
Of my friends, I know only a couple with TV and that is because they are diehard soccer fans.
I keep the news on my office TV with the sound down. Does that count me as a watcher of traditional TV? I would argue I'm not really watching it and that's hardly traditional. Same when I'm watching Netflix. I might have the baseball game on one TV muted while I'm watching streaming on another. Even with all that going, I might be working and using the TVs for background noise.
None of those statistics really capture the new paradigm.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
...Comcast doesn't know I turned off my TV.
Uh, you assume they don't know. The reality is it probably wouldn't be that difficult to create a script that monitors the HDMI output port of a cable box...
Will all keep TV artificially alive in the non net neutral era.
Watching TV is what they do, and there are a lot of old people.
Give it time.
Netflix & Amazon are TV, they're just a different delivery mechanism. We didn't talk about cable destroying TV as it became more popular than antennas.
Youtube & Facebook are different IMO as they serve an entirely different kind of content.
We are a storytelling, story-loving creature.
Nobody thinks you are frying your brain if you go watch a play on the stage. Why do they think you are if you watch the same play on the screen?
Nobody thinks you are "reading the idiot book" if you read a Sherlock Holmes story. Why do they think you are "watching the idiot box" if you watch a Sherlock Holmes story?
Personally, I often prefer reading. But I don't see what's so intrinsically bad about screens.
What makes you think the HDMI port from my cable box is connected to my TV? It is, but there's no reason it has to be.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
A newly discovered gusher of sitcom and reality TV viewers under the Texas Permian Basin debunks the mainstream media's "Peak boobtube" fake news. Estimates range from 120 million to 200 million gallons per day (beer consumption) with comparable quantities of Big Macs, KFC, pizza and Diet Coke.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Same here. On all the time but nobody's watching. Unless something catches our attention then we back up the DVR.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
... the internet is interactive. Also people are either 1) Watching netflix or 2 downloading and deferring their watching until later. So that would slowly eat into TV. But most people aren't technology literate. The same reason why steam and mmo's exist -- they could only exist in a world where the vast majority of people don't understand how computers work and easily buy into corporate propaganda.
America, home of the stupid. We deserve to fade in to irrelevance.
... and those who are smarter than everyone else and still can figure it out.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
I don't know about you, but I probably clock 12+ hours of TV per day on average - basically any time I'm programming I have something (usually TV shows, but push that number up to 16-18+ hours if you count movies) streaming in the background. What we really need to look at, as a national issue, is forcing entertainers to make more quality sci-fi, I can only rewatch it so much before being forced to watch lesser programming.
You can program the Comcast remote so that it can control your TV as well. More convenient, but also great for Comcast who now know when you power up your TV -- "she just hit the power up all button".
I come here for the love
Me personally? I'd say they were right. The US *massively* over-reacted to 9/11. School shootings are a big deal, but the media should stop harping on them -- publicity only encourages copycats.
Mod parent up, insightful.
So your receiver then. They can tell when that is off. You can typically also tell when the upstream display device is off even if you go through a receiver.
They can't tell if it's muted though :D
You can typically also tell when the upstream display device is off even if you go through a receiver.
I don't believe this.
NT.
I've received a Nielsen ratings packet every couple of years for the past decade. It's all manually reported in a paper journal they provide.
I'm sure there are automated collection methods also, but I don't think people understand that manual surveying is going on.
Is the 8 hours something like 2 hours per day, multiplied by 4 people per household?
the microphones and cameras and other sensors hidden in the receiver combined with the spy capabilities of the 'smart' television will all give away your viewing habits when simple channel changing, osg and remote usage doesn't.
don't you worry. we got this
- comcast
And this may be the bottom of tale - be careful citing changes in something that's been tracked for a long period of time. The metrics explored, the hardware used, the software used, the editorial bent of the persons reporting can change things either subtly or overtly.
Details matter.
That said, every time I walk through an urban or suburban neighborhood at night, I'm always struck by the amount of flickering, bluish light emanating from the windows. People are busy watching something.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Is your smartphone in the vicinity?
They might by watching DVDs. I make sure the station I like best is on the tele before I put the DVD in. That way it gets credit for being "watched".
There is some boggling thought (or newspeak?) here:
That's like saying the Ford Focus and Toyota Corolla destroyed cars. No, they're cars. Netflix is TV. Amazon Prime is an upfront amortized delivery charge plus TV. Youtube is TV. They bit into competitors; they didn't do the slightest damage to the TV itself. They became it. Similarly:
And among those "non-TV" things, you listed at least two extremely-TV things (Youtube and Netflix) and probably a third (phones, some of which people use as TVs, though I don't know how they can stand it).
You're not even wrong; you don't make sense.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
On their website, Nielson says:
Chosen at random through proven methodology, Nielsen’s U.S. TV families represent a cross-section of representative homes throughout the country.
That's a lie.
Nielson only selects people who watch enough TV to survey. We don't really watch TV, and Nielson sent me their diary for a week and told me if I filled it out they'd let me do a month's worth and pay me a pittance.I figured I would to see what happened. What happened was that they sent me a response saying in effect that I did not meet their criteria to be a "Nielson Household". Why? We didn't watch enough TV. Too much Netflix and YouTube, and not enough cable.
So while I can believe that Nielson has an understanding of what people are watching on TV, it's complete bullshit to call this number the average that Americans watch per day. It's the average of users who Nielson thinks watch enough TV that they want to survey. Nothing more, nothing less.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Are people really watching 8hrs a day or is the TV simply on?
And it keeps getting stupider and stupider...
Um.. to non-Christians, Satan/Lucifer/Devil is considered part of Christianity. He's one of that religion's characters. Take away the religion, and you have taken away the character. Without Christianity, Satan is just another rogue competing with Batman, Han Solo, etc, except not as cool. What I mean is, unless you primarily think like a Christian (even if you don't claim to be a Christian), the show sounds uninteresting on the face of it.
(The only way to make Satan worthwhile to non-Christians is if you remove the religious framework and turn him into just another bad guy. Because if you don't do that, then you're just teaching Christianity.)
Yes, I'm judging a book by its cover and sometimes that's a poor strategy. But there's a fuckton of TV shows (far more than I have time to watch) and that's one of the first filters. The point is: from the outside, it looks like a Christian show (and your description just more confirms it), so non-Christians aren't likely to be interested. It's not "over peoples' heads"; it's just that it's a boring-looking fish in a HUGE pond. Huge. I can't stress how ridiculously long the menu of TV shows is. A religious show isn't going to make the cut for a lot of us.
Gozer was an exception, though, which just goes to show that it can happen. But don't hold your breath.
Vorlons. There you go. That was religion done right!
As someone who has had neither cable nor broadcast tv connected in about a decade, how do we figure into these 'average households'?
I suspect by being not included at all, bringing the average up farther.
Women in droves are leaving the family. Men have not much else to do but watch tons of TV especially since they can't afford anything.
That all of those services you have listed *are* TV watching. The method of distribution or device used is irrelevant. Why is it so difficult for millennials to grasp these concepts? The truth is, as glued to devices as people are, and as large as the world's population is now, TV watching is likely greater than it's ever been. Does it make Silicon Valley angry that rather than 'inventing' or 'disrupting' TV, they have just moved it? Streaming is 21st century cable. Deal with it.
2009 was the end of analog TV broadcast. I definitely have not watched TV since then, and probably quite a bit before that.
I've never bought cable TV. I only watch streaming videos, and before that, mostly rentals.
I cannot stand to be in a room with commercial tv.
Redo this when the Boomers are mostly dead.
I don't wonder. I voted for him. My friends voted for him.
People like you are so out of touch with reality and the rest of our country that you couldn't see what was right in front of you the whole time.
with HDMI CEC we know either:
1. that your TV doesn't report on/off
2. when you turn your TV on/off.
as a set-top box developer I assure you that we've logged the information (semi-anonymously) as part of our statistics and customer experience metrics back-end.
Nielsen does, on average.
The only way I can come up with the average household watching nearly 9 hours of traditional tv per day is by including the families which plop their kids in front of the boob tube. I watch about 90 minutes per night, but my kids probably watch an hour per day while I'm at work. Not ideal, but kids entertained by the tv means my wife can vacuum the other rooms, do laundry, etc, without the kids all over her.
What kind of fade-in? Did you mean a regular fade-in or a cross-fading?
Or do you not know the difference between "in to" and "into"?
So your receiver then. They can tell when that is off. You can typically also tell when the upstream display device is off even if you go through a receiver.
HDMI (more correctly HDCP) does know if the device on the other end is listening, but I doubt it reports the status of devices upstream except if the receiver is turned on and the HDMI from the cable box is hooked up to a pass through port on the receiver.
You can program the Comcast remote so that it can control your TV as well. More convenient, but also great for Comcast who now know when you power up your TV -- "she just hit the power up all button".
Your Comcast remote is only outputting codes recognized by your tv, bd, receiver, etc; it does not send a signal to your cable box saying it is turning on another device. Research how universal remotes work.
My TV watching peaking in 1986, the year I watched re-runs of The Pirate Movie (1982) over 100 times. Also MTV was a music video channel featuring almost entirely new music, and there was a second (!!) music video channel that mostly showed classic rock videos and last years hits. That's before even adding up Star Trek, The Gummy Bears, Smurfs, etc.
In my case that is true, because I bought a "not smart" TV. But keep in mind, they only had 2 non-smart models in the store; 1 in each of two sizes.
If you have a "smart TV," you really can't make statements about what it can or can't do, because you don't know and they won't tell you.
It knows if it wants to, because the device ID and capabilities get communicated.
It isn't like detecting a headphone jack, where you only know if something is physically connected.
It depends if you're talking about the "average person" or the "average television viewer."
It seems that they're talking about the "average television viewer," and you're not listening and understanding their feelings. Instead you hear the word "average" and are triggered. Notice in what you quoted them saying, they said "of representative homes," not "of homes."
Listen to their words, they didn't lie; the lie was when you claimed to understand their words.
It's still deceptive. Watching Netflix seems a lot like watching television to me, so people who watch Netflix are television viewers but apparently not surveyed by Nielson.
Meanwhile, lets look at that direct quote from Nielson's own website again:
Chosen at random through proven methodology, Nielsen’s U.S. TV families represent a cross-section of representative homes throughout the country.
Except for homes that don't watch enough content from people that pay them for survey results.
I read this phrase here and it stuck with me.
Trump is the only Republican that could have beat Hillary. On the flipside, Hillary is the only Democrat that Trump could have beaten.
Well, this certainly explains a lot about the current state of the US.
Let's just say we all wasted just a little time here today.
I think that other channel was known as VH1.
If you're talking big dish satellite time-frames (mid 80s), then that station would be MuchMusic, a Canadian MTV clone. Only problem was they seemed really, really like "The Safety Dance". It was on an extremely heavy rotation, at least 6 or 8 times a day.
I wonder if that was a prelude to Rick-rolling, since Rick wasn't famous yet.
Let's just say we all wasted just a little time here today.
There's a point to /. other than that?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
TV is just wallpaper now - most people are doing other things at the same time
Less than 4 hours a day. And during the summer less than 2 1/2 to 3.
That's a lie.
Nielson only selects people who watch enough TV to survey.
Same goes for so called 'focus-groups'. I signed up because of my job and income they pay a decent cash gift for participating in groups and I wanted some extra pocket money.
I went to a couple and they ask for honest feedback which I gave them, but it became obvious that they didn't want people like me. I'm a cynic and as a former engineer I always look for faults, so when they show a new commercial or new product I'd always pick it to bits with some honest analysis. I noted early on that I started to get ignored int he group discussion, and the people that loved the product got all the attention. Then I stopped getting invites to attend.
The entire industry is corrupt and use pseudo-science to generate income. I wouldn't trust anything they say.
I barely ever watch TV, except for a little bit of whatever's on at night when I'm in bed but not yet asleep. (Often catch the late night news broadcast at that time, and/or some random entertaining thing like an episode of Family Guy or what-not.)
But I look at all the time the televisions are on at home here, and everywhere else I go, and I consistently see the same 2 things:
1. Especially with the elderly, they leave the TV on as sort of a "security blanket". They doze off while it's on or get bored with whatever's on and walk away from it a lot - but they get something out of it making a constant background noise, and that feeling that if something important happens, they'll quickly be informed about it. They tend to pay attention in little chunks, if, say, a game show comes on that they're finding enjoyable to watch, or something on a talk show grabs their attention.
2. Most other people I know leave the TV on while they're working on other things. An ex-g/f of mine has a photography business, for example. And she claims to be watching a whole list of TV series she's "following" at any given time. But it's almost always just on in the background while she's doing photo edits and posting things to web pages. My wife does this too ... constantly "watching" crime shows like NCIS or Law & Order, but always while she's doing school work or trying to write letters or what-not. I really don't believe people are getting everything out of the programming when they consume it this way -- but maybe some people multitask a lot better than I do? I feel like if something is worth watching at all, it's worth giving it my undivided attention so I can give it the attention it deserves.
You seem really challenged to understand this word, "representative."
My advice is to use a dictionary; a useful tool for a whole life, not just some large tome that a teacher once pointed at.
I understand it just fine. I also understand that if you bias the selection in a particular direction your sample is no longer representative of the population.
The newer boxes do. That's how they implement the power saving mode. When the TV has been off for a certain amount of time then the box shuts off unless a recording is scheduled.
you have old people who have nothing else to do but watch tv (they watch anything, it doesn't matter what it is)
and young people, who just turn on the tv, but don't really watch it.
that is how (traditional) tv is watched today.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Your Comcast remote is only outputting codes recognized by your tv, bd, receiver, etc; it does not send a signal to your cable box saying it is turning on another device. Research how universal remotes work.
Speaking how (any) remote work, the end effect turns up to be the opposite :
IR light is IR light, no matter what the logo on the remote say.
IR light is only relatively targeted (it's not an IR *laser*, it's a IR *LED*, and its light bounces nicely off most light-coloured walls. Test it : instead of pointing the IR at the TV, you can also control it by pointing at a white wall behind you.
Basically, the device detects undirected IR blinks.)
So as long as the comcast box isn't in an entirely different room, chances are its IR sensor will see the IR light too.
It's only because its a different *code*, the comcast box knows that it's not destined to it.
But to reach that point, the IR light has already been sensed and the pulse-train has already been decoded into a code, which has correctly been identified as a "target device-specific command".
At that point the box know pretty well you've been pushing the "On" button.
It's an information that could be beamed to the mothership if the firmware is designed to do so.
And then there's an entire different beast lurking there :
most of modern devices are linked through HMDI cables,
HDMI supports CEC commands.
Basically:
- the comcast is already aware if the TV is off - as the TV is already saying so over CEC.
- lots of devices are able to forward commands over CEC (e.g.: the TV should be able to ask the Comcast box to turn on if you select its HDMI input) so in fact, no matter how IR universal remotes work, the devices can already send commands to each other on the HDMI network.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The reason that The Safety Dance was on heavy rotation on MuchMusic was probably the Canadian Content (CanCon) laws. Broadcasters in Canada, including cable channels, are required to broadcast a certain percentage of programming that was made in Canada and/or features Canadian performers.
Music has the clearest definition of Canadian content. It is scored on four things: Music (written by a Canadian), Artist (performed by Canadians), Performance (recorded or performed live in Canada), and Lyrics (written by a Canadian). To count as CanCon at least two of those four things must be true. The Safety Dance passes with flying colors, scoring all four points. The music video, however, was filmed in England.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Safety_Dance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_of_Youth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Without_Hats