There is something very wrong about the picture which Nielsen paints of US life in its Three Screens report, with one fact, that people watch on average 151 hours of TV a month, and that this is rising, being the most worrying.
It is an incredible luxury to be able to be able to watch 5 hours of TV each day, and yet still find time to consume a further 3 hours of online video and a further 4 hours of mobile video each month, bringing the total to 158 hours of video viewing a month ‘ if you don’t count the cinema and watching DVDs.
Also there must be something very wrong with those families that it takes as samples because Nielsen reckons that viewing of DVR and other timeshifted TV only takes up 7 hours, 11 minutes a month. We figure they put in that 11 minutes to make it clear that the measurement is precise. We worry that this is not the case.
They should come to my household where ALL TV is watched on a DVR, all 2 hours a day of it, with children perhaps managing a further hour a day. Other neighbors with DVRs say the same. That would make TV hours down around 75 hours, perhaps a little more with weekends.
The Nielsen figures paint a picture of Americans as slothful, lazy, couch potatoes who have no hobbies and who lay with their eyes propped open with matchsticks so that they can take in their favorite programs while asleep. And we don’t buy it. Kids do their homework in front of a TV that’s on, but they are not watching TV. Dad may work with the game on in the background, but he’s listening to the sound track while fixing the plumbing or finishing a work project.
And all of them are watching TV in fast forward mode, cutting out hours of TV advertising by watching programming they like on a DVR and then telling Nielsen that they watched it on broadcast, because they are savvy. Tell Nielsen the truth and someone will take away their free pay TV supplied DVR and they will be forced to watch more hours (like 5 a day) and also watch all of those adverts.
There is something incongruous in letting the company which most relies on TV advertising slots to drive revenues, also being the company which counts how many hours of TV a country consume.
And other research companies have shown a slightly different picture. What is almost certainly happening here is that Nielsen is happy with a level of ‘inexactitude.’ In a US household people leave the TV on practically whenever they are in the house and sometimes when they are out of it. Sometimes two or three TVs are blaring away, but no-one is watching them. When someone watches TV it is with about 40% of the time taken out as the adverts are removed, fast forwarding on a DVR, that way it turns out that US people are not so different from the rest of the world, except more of them have DVRs.
And what makes us fairly sure of this is that back in July last year Nielsen publicized another of its periodic counts of how digital entertainment is consumed by the average US family. And guess what, it used that same phrase, ‘Americans are watching more TV than ever,’ which suggests a fraud on the US video industry on a scale with Enron. Last time people had leapt to watching 121 hours of broadcast TV a month. DVR TV was up to just 6 hours.
If we believe this, US viewers have in seven months added an entire hour of TV viewing for each day. Now you imagine your own life and find that hour. What would you have to give up? Playing golf, your morning run or swim, taking the kids to the Mall, a beer with your pals? At least all of that and more. Another hour a day just can’t be done, so these figures just can’t be right.
If you have 120 hours or so a month to watch TV, and you’ve always had that many hours, unless you get laid off (the recession may have an impact), what you do is record as much as you can on a DVR, and then watch 120 hours of TV, but you REPORT it as 150 hours of broadcast TV. Or maybe 200. You have roughly 40% of advertising that is being bypassed so it could reach 200 hours, but that would be silly because it would imply that if you did not use the DVR you are watching TV 7 hours a day. So that’s 8 hours for sleeping, 8 for work, a couple for traveling to and from work and eating, and another 7 hours for TV ‘ so a 25 hour day with NOTHING else in it.
You could argue the recession is putting people out of jobs and they are sitting at home and watching TV ‘ well yes, but it’s also putting some people out of homes and then where do they watch TV? It just doesn’t stack up. We’re not saying that Nielsen is lying, just easily fooled into believing what it would like to be true.
The time on the PC is very carefully suggested as ‘at work’ time, because to suggest it is at home would confuse the mix further, and make the TV viewing figures even less likely.
In the July report the time spent watching mobile TV was around 10 minutes per working day. Now it’s around 9 minutes a day but they say it has increased radically. How can that be right with every other survey saying that it’s up.
Back in July this comment was released with the Three Screens report by the head of marketing at Nielsen, “Commercial television is alive and well – growing 1% year over year – despite the rapid adoption of other platforms. Moreover, timeshifting represents less than 5% of total viewing.”
If that was a politician speaking about the economy this is what you would have heard, ‘The US economy is strong, and growing, with outputs up and employment stabilizing, moreover the hiccup that US banks are experiencing will shortly be over and we can all get back to work,’ That’s right, you wouldn’t believe that either because it’s not credible and you know politicians have a vested interest to lie.
If Americans only watch video over the Internet for 3 hours a month it’s because only a small percentage of those people are watching it and the total is being averaged out. That’s not what Nielsen says it is doing, but it is likely that it is. After Hulu, YouTube and MySpace music videos are all taken into account on the home PC, the work PC and anywhere else, we think nine minutes a day is very low number. And when do the US people watch all that pirated video that the MPAA says it is stealing?
The quote for the new version of the report says. ‘The American fascination with television and other video content is not easing up, as consumers keep turning to TV, Internet and Mobile at record levels,’ said Susan Whiting, vice chair of The Nielsen Company. ‘Viewers appear to be choosing the best screen available for their video consumption, weighing a variety of factors, including convenience, quality and access. It is clear that TV remains the main vehicle for viewing video, although online and mobile platforms are an increasingly important complement to live home-based television.’
The clues are there in the wording, TV is the main source, the others do not replace it, they ‘complement’ it.
Other facts from the report ‘ and we love these two – highest viewing of mobile video is in the teen years and separately, the older you get the more TV you watch ‘ reassuring isn’t it and gives the impression that mobile and internet viewing are just inconveniences and as you get older you leave them behind and TV rules. The problem with that conclusion is that broadcast TV viewing is recorded by interview, personal record keeping and honesty, while mobile and online viewing can be captured and are something you should be sure of.
Nielsen 4Q08 data also shows that 11 million Americans, a rise of 9% over the previous quarter are now watching mobile content, but average viewing times only rose 2%. That does not concur with other reports we have cited which show far more growth.
Wait until ATSC M/H mobile TV launches in the US. We bet that the first Nielsen survey has Americans watching it another hour a day, stretching the day to 26 hours.