• by Karl Greenberg , February 22, 2008

If eyeballs are glued to any tube, it's more and more likely to be YouTube rather than the Boob Tube across the room.

Tech and media consultancy IDC, which has published a study on consumer online behavior, reports that the Internet is where people spend the most time browsing--32.7 hours per week.

The study says people spend 70.6 hours per week, on average, with all media. They spend 16.4 hours glued to television and 3.9 hours with newspapers and magazines.

Karsten Weide, the study's program director of digital media and entertainment, confirms what the ad media market has been doing for the past few years, as broadband Internet access has mostly supplanted narrower conduits making the Web a video medium. "This suggests that advertising budgets will continue to be shifted out of television, newspapers and magazines into Internet advertising."

Results are based on a sample of 992 U.S. residents 15 years of age or older, who frequently use the Internet--including quotas by gender, age group, ethnicity, region, and income.

No surprise--age determines media use, with older consumers favoring TV and print. Eighty-four percent of survey respondents use search engines; 83% use maps and geographic navigation; 77% do other kinds of research, and 76% do e-mail.

Early in the millennium, "convergence" was the buzzword for how the Internet would alter devices by making television an extension of the Web. New devices, as IDC points out in the study, show that convergence means a proliferation of devices--many of them mobile.

"Internet usage will become more mobile," says the firm, which sees a new category of Web-enabled devices beyond the traditional lap and desktop computers and WAP phones: the WiFi-enabled Amazon Kindle, the Nokia N800, and the next-generation Apple iPod.