Kid Statistics

To see how much TV kids are watching:

http://www.tvsmarter.com/documents/stats-kids.html

TV Watching in the U.S.A.

"According to the study, heavy TV viewers in the U.S. spend an average of 705 minutes a day in front of the tube—that’s almost 12 hours! And the amount of time they watch continues to rise. Since 2009, heavy viewers have increased their TV viewing by 8 percent—that’s almost a one-hour increase in daily viewing."  -  Neilson (May 2014)

"The ratings company [Neilson] also looked at media consumption patterns by age, finding that our TV habits start young, dip during teenage years, then rise steadily for the rest our lives. Here’s a look at weekly TV usage by age group:

2-11: 24 hours, 16 minutes       [ 3:28 hours per day]

12-17: 20 hours, 41 minutes     [ 2:57 hours per day]

18-24: 22 hours, 27 minutes     [ 3:12 hours per day]

25-34: 27 hours, 36 minutes     [ 3:56 hours per day]

35-49: 33 hours, 40 minutes     [ 4:48 hours per day]

50-64: 43 hours, 56 minutes     [ 6:48 hours per day]

65-plus: 50 hours, 34 minutes   [ 7:13 hours per day]

So don’t worry about missing this week’s episode of True Detective, you’ll be spending the rest of your life in front of the TV anyway."   -  Slate (March 2014)  and  Daily News (March 2014)

"If the common perception of binge watching was a weekend-long, pajama-wearing marathon of TV viewing, survey respondents don't see it that way. A majority (73%) defined binge watching as watching between 2-6 episodes of the same TV show in one sitting.  And there's no guilt in it.  Nearly three quarters of TV streamers (73%) say they have positive feelings towards binge streaming TV."  -  PR News Wire (Dec 2013)

"The average American watches 34 hours of television per week" - Newser (Jan 2011)

"Top 5 WeTime Activities for Families: 1. Watching television or movies (86%)"  Reuters (Jan 2011)

"When it comes to the most television units per household, the greater Atlanta area in Georgia, however, has the most television fanatics, Retrevo found."  -  Live Science (August 2010)

"Older adults watch more TV than younger people, enjoy it less "   -  eScience News (June 2010)

"TV is still the #1 screen. Television viewership remains at hundreds of hours per month, while viewership of broadband and mobile video remains in the low single digits...In 2Q 2009, watching TV in the home accounted for 77% of screen time among consumers age 2+, up 1.5% year-over-year."  -  TV Is Not Dead (Feb 2010)

"The recent results of Nielsen’s Three Screen Report – a quarterly analysis from Nielsen’s Anywhere Anytime Media Measurement initiative (A2/M2) – show that the average American watches approximately 153 hours of TV every month at home, a 1.2% increase from last year."  -  Neilson Wire (May 2009)

"Nielsen's 'Three Screen Report' for the fourth quarter says the average American now watches more than 151 hours of TV a month."  -  L.A. Times (Feb 2009) 

"Nielsen Reports Television Tuning Remains at Record Levels" - Nielson (Oct 2007)

"TV got going in earnest 65 years ago today, when the first scheduled commercial television program was broadcast by the National Broadcasting Company from the Empire State Building in New York City. The July 1, 1941 broadcast, considered the first commercial effort, was on Channel 1."   -  Live Science (July 2006)

"TV viewing at highest levels ever" - ZDNet (Jan 2006)

Television Statistics  - Source Book

Media Use Statistics

"Americans average about 40 hours of free time per week. That's a gain of almost one hour per day since 1965."

Television and Leisure Time: Yesterday, Today, and (Maybe) Tomorrow

Study: Boomers are reading more as they age - TV viewership is also on the rise

Number of TVs > number of people

Average home has more TVs than people

Participation in almost every recreational sport, from golf and tennis to bowling and snow skiing, was down in 2004, while attendance at professional sporting events was up.

We discovered that just as there are conservatives, liberals and moderates, there are people with red, blue and purple taste.

TV Scheduling In America Has Overshadowed Natural Circadian Rhythms

News

Saving the American Time Use Survey (ATUS)

Research suggests the housework and general exercise that stay-at-home housewives did in 1953 were more successful at shedding the pounds.

Neilson 2012

"In a report put out yesterday on the State of the Media summarizing 2011 data, Nielsen estimates Americans spend an average of 32 hours and 47 minutes a week watching traditional TV. They only spend an average of 3 hours and 58 minutes a week on the Internet, and only 27 minutes a week watching video online. All those billions of videos watched online still only represent 1.4 percent of the time spent watching traditional TV."  (Note 32:47 per week equals 4:41 per day)  -  Tech Crunch (Jan 2012)

eMarketer 2011

Census 2008

Census 2008 - Leisure Time (age 15 and older)

Census 2006

"One of the main findings predicts that Americans will be more electronically inclined -- or enslaved -- than ever in 2007. They'll be parked in front of their TVs for 65 days and on the Internet for more than a week, according to projections from a communications industry forecast." - San Francisco Chronicle (Dec 2006)

Note: 65 days works out to about 4:16 per day

           (65  x 24 hrs / 365 days)

Bureau of Labor Statistics

"Time spent in leisure and sports activities for the civilian population by selected characteristics, 2006 annual averages" -  United States Department of Labor

Note: the averages are lower than the Census or Neilson. Presumably this is because the labor averages don't include children and because of overlap, i.e. doing housework, or homework, etc. while watching TV.

Educational Attainment:

Employment Status:

Earnings of full-time wage and salary workers:

Age:

Note: numbers are approximate, see link to original table for exact numbers.

Weekdays and weekends were averaged together.

((weekdays x 5) + (weekends x 2))/ 6.97

Also, I assumed that there was an equal number of women and men. ((women + men) / 2)

Bureau of Labor Statistics - 2008

TV versus the Internet

"In other words, the average American spends about as much time watching TV on any given day as they spend on Facebook in an entire month. What’s more, the Nielsen data covers the entire U.S. population, whereas “only” about half the U.S. population is on Facebook. Indeed, the average American, as measured by Nielsen in the third quarter of 2011, spends only about 25 hours per month on the Internet altogether, meaning TV is still beating the interactive medium quite handily in terms of time spent."   -  Media Post (June 2012)

TV on the Internet

"Has binge watching changed the way we live our lives? Netflix and cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken recently found that 61 percent of streaming television users binge on their shows and 73 percent feel positive about this kind of viewing."   -  Huffington Post (Dec 2013)

"TV Viewing's Shift to the Web [STATS]"   -  Mashable (April 2010)

Household TV Watching Around the World

"American households watch the box for over eight hours a day on average, twice as long as anyone else. Viewing has fallen in some countries. Turks reportedly watched an hour's less television per day in 2007 than they did only two years earlier, when the country was America's nearest rival as couch-potato king." - The Economist (Sept 2009) 

More on TV Watching Around the World

Television viewing by country - Hours per person per week

TV Watching in Korea

TV Watching in Latin America

TV Watching in 13 European Countries

"Both for women and for men, watching television occupies an important share of free time, around 40% in the majority of the countries. Hungary exceeds 50% while this share is below 40% in Norway and Sweden."  -  Time use at different stages of life Results from 13 European countries (July 2003) - page 8

Watching TV - British Statistics

"In fact, the report shows that the average British person now watches an average of four hours and two minutes of TV a day, up from an average of three hours and 36 minutes a day in 2006."  -  The Guardian (March 2013)

"It's official: the average Briton now watches four hours of television a day."  -  The Guardian (March 2013)

More TV = Less Reading

"A major study that compared 10 communities with or without television revealed that television viewing had the greatest impact on other media use, such as comic reading, listening to the radio, and going to the movies.17 Television viewing had little influence on the time that children spent reading books or doing homework, even during its early introductory stages." - AAP Pediatrics (Feb 2006)

So basically the authors concluded that the hours that children spend watching television did not displace reading because reading comic books does not count as "reading". Also note their term "even during its early introductory stages". During TV's early introductory stages people (adults and children) watched much less TV than is common today.

"The most striking results were generational. In general, older Dutch people read more. It would be natural to infer from this that each generation reads more as it ages, and, indeed, the researchers found something like this to be the case for earlier generations. But, with later ones, the age-related growth in reading dwindled. The turning point seems to have come with the generation born in the nineteen-forties. By 1995, a Dutch college graduate born after 1969 was likely to spend fewer hours reading each week than a little-educated person born before 1950. As far as reading habits were concerned, academic credentials mattered less than whether a person had been raised in the era of television. The N.E.A., in its twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern. Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation—even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago." - The New Yorker (Dec 2007)

Reading Statistics

Poll: One in four adults read no books last year

Study: Boomers are reading more as they age - TV viewership is also on the rise

"The latest National Endowment for the Arts report draws on a variety of sources, public and private, and essentially reaches one conclusion: Americans are reading a lot less."

Most Literate U.S. Cities: Minneapolis and Seattle

International Comparisons

International Comparisons in Education

Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)