Times They Are a Changin

In the future you will be able to watch any episode of any TV show or any movie or listen to any song ever made on any device (computer, cell phone, TV) you want, at any time you want.
Trust me, that is the future.
But media companies are trying their best to resist this eventuality.
They should take notice of this study from Nielsen which shows the changing viewing habits of Americans.


"Nielsen found that during the fourth quarter of 2008 the number of users and the time spent watching each of the three screen media (TV, computer, mobile device) rose from the previous quarter.
The biggest jumps came in the number of viewers watching video on mobile devices and "time shifted" television, that is, programming viewed with a digital-video recorder. Each rose about 9% in the fourth quarter from the third quarter. Roughly 11 million people used mobile viewing and 74 million people watched DVR programming. Internet video users increased 2.3% to 123 million people.

Traditional television is still the most popular by far. Roughly 285 million of the nation's 306 million people (who are these 21 million people? the blind? infants? the comatose?) watched TV in their home in the fourth quarter, up about three million people, or 1%, from the prior quarter.

Television also wins in terms of the time spent on each medium. People spent more time watching TV: an average of 151 hours a month or five hours a day -- a record high, according to Nielsen. That is a 7% increase, or roughly 11 hours more.

Internet video viewers, on the other hand, spent just under three hours on that a month, or 22 more minutes than the prior quarter, a nearly 15% increase.

In both time spent and number of viewers, Internet video grew at a rate twice that of television.
For the first time in the Nielsen study, people ages 18-24 spent nearly the same amount of time -- roughly five hours -- watching Internet video each month as they did watching DVR programs. Other age brackets watched half as much or less Internet video than they did DVR video.

Online video viewing is increasingly seen as more valuable than DVR viewing because, unlike DVR viewing, viewers can't fast-forward through the advertising.

Television viewing, however, remains the most valuable for advertisers because of its breadth of audience."