Americans Channel More TV: Viewing Up 20% From 1999

by Wayne Friedman , November 10, 2009

tv watchers

Nielsen says U.S. TV viewers broke another record -- increasing their consumption last year.

The media research company said U.S. viewers watched 4 hours and 49 minutes of TV per day for the 2008-2009 season -- when looking at live viewing plus seven days of DVR playback.

That's up four minutes -- or 1.4% -- from the previous season. Nielsen says TV viewing is up 20% from a decade ago.

Why the rise? Nielsen says the gain came from more television sets in homes and more channels available for U.S. viewers. In addition, DVRs have increased the overall TV usage total: live and playback.

It also appears that viewership improvements came in non-prime-time dayparts.

Prime-time viewership was the same -- at 1 hour and 12 minutes -- in the 2008-2009 season as it was for the 2007-2008 season. Prime-time viewership has stayed relatively constant since 1991. Average duration back then was also 1 hour and 12 minutes.

Since 1991, prime-time viewing dipped slowly to one hour and eight minutes between 1996 and 1999, then started to rise. During roughly the same time span, a similar trend occurred with overall day viewing.

media measurement, tv

3 comments about "Americans Channel More TV: Viewing Up 20% From 1999".

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Douglas Ferguson from College of Charleston, November 11, 2009 at 8:51 a.m.
Yes, viewing is way up, but viewing per channel is eroding with each additional new choice. Fragmentation is the story, not total usage.
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Dan Modisett from Raycom, November 11, 2009 at 3:44 p.m.

Television as a consumable platform is still the most viable of all media. Print is going electronic with online and Kindle related products. Radio has to share time with satellite radio, ipods, mp3s and iphones. Television stations will have to fight for viewers, but at least they have a fighting chance.

Kevin Barry, November 13, 2009 at 11:51 a.m.

As long as you can buy all the fragments, who cares how many choices they are split among? With all the tectonic changes going on in media, television still has a larger audience this year than last year--a claim newspapers and radio have been unable to make for many, many years. And this is a claim that television has been able to make each year for the past decade. What's notable to me is that in 10 years of significant audience growth for TV, broadcast tv viewing is WAY down. All the growth is from cable sources.