• by Wayne Friedman , April 3, 2008

The four-month-long writers' strike this winter had little effect on overall TV viewing--although younger TV viewers increasingly shifted regular viewing habits to alternatives.

Nielsen Media Research says that during the same period, live-plus-seven-day viewing data showed little change from the previous year. Breaking down specific TV media, however, reveals that network TV did endure losses, while advertiser supported cable showed an increase in viewership.

Overall, viewership at the networks showed a 6.1% decline during the strike period from Nov. 5 to Feb. 10, with younger viewers ages 18-34 leaving the network airwaves by 11.1%. Older viewers tended to remain with network programming, only dropping off 4.3%.

The better news for the five broadcast networks: there was about the same amount of original programming during the strike period as the same time period in 2007. Nielsen says that 63.4% of network lineups were original, as compared with 67.8% for the previous year.

Nielsen says 18-34 viewing--which grew in the pre-strike period from Sept. 24 through Nov. 4 by 4.3%--also was up during the strike period, 2.5%, suggesting that many migrated to cable.

Local TV showed some dips, especially in late-news programming during the strike. Still, those shows had higher levels once the late-night network shows came back in early January.

Not surprisingly, both men and general TV viewers went to the Internet for television, as well as consumer-generated content. Some 55% of respondents said they were watching more TV shows on the Internet, with 32% saying they were viewing about the same levels, and 13% saying they were watching less than a year ago.

As for alternative viewing, Nielsen says 67% were watching more DVD TV shows than a year ago. This compares to 59% saying they were watching more TV or movies on their DVRs, and 51% said they did more Internet surfing than a year ago.

Time spent watching videos or movies on the Internet grew substantially--from 32 minutes, 52 seconds to 50 minutes, 48 seconds in November, the first month of the strike. The biggest gain was seen with online gaming, adding over an hour on average to 3:20:43 from 2:16:15 the year before.

Nielsen noted that young women were twice as likely to spend time watching TV programs on network sites, as compared with young men. Young men 18-34 were two-and-a-half times as likely to watch consumer-generated videos as women.

Still, Nielsen cautions that strike or no strike, viewers were viewing both regular TV programs and alternative video on the Internet in increasing numbers.

YouTube is still far and away the biggest Internet video site, with 2.6 billion streams in the month of December and 67.1 million unique visitors. Behind in second place was Yahoo, with 371 million streams and 26.6 million unique visitors.