Headlamp Pictures Blog

I’m a little late posting this one, but a fascinating study that shows we like to surf and watch! (and I thought it was only me…) The two media can and will stand side-by-side for quite a while.

Written by Ryan Lawler

Posted Monday, March 22, 2010 at 8:30 AM PT

Nielsen: Media Multitasking Catches On

People are watching more TV than ever and using the Internet more than ever before. So how do they find the time? Mainly by doing both at the same time, according to new research from Nielsen. In its latest Three Screen Report, Nielsen found that 59 percent of consumers watched TV while simultaneously surfing the Internet, up from 57.9 percent in December 2008. The amount of time they spend doing also increased dramatically; on average, Americans spent three and a half hours on the Internet while also watching TV in December 2009, up from two hours and 36 minutes just a year before.

In December, the average American watched an average of 35 hours of live TV per week, with an additional two hours of timeshifted TV, Nielsen reports. The amount of television people watch is up about two percent from the year before, but DVR usage is up about 28 percent. In addition, Americans spent about four hours of their week on the Internet, including watching 22 minutes of online video and four minutes of mobile video.

The amount of online video consumers are viewing has grown 16 percent year-over-year, and it appears that much of that viewing is happening while people are at work. Approximately 44 percent of all online video viewing is happening in the workplace, according to Nielsen, a stat that probably won’t be too surprising for those who follow events like March Madness on Demand, which has been made available live online by CBS Sports. CBS saw a huge spike in traffic during the first day of the tournament in the hour after 2 PM EST, during which it delivered 533,000 streaming hours of video for the full hour.

While the amount of time Americans spent viewing mobile video remained flat, the number of users that watched mobile video increased dramatically. With an increase in the number of smartphones on the market and in user’s hands, the number of consumers watching mobile video increased 57 percent year-over-year, from 11.2 million to 17.6 million.

1 comments:

Colin Powers said…

Like John, I’m interested to see how the dialogue develops on some of your provocative ideas. Anyone involved in the PBS system who doesn’t feel the pain of investing heavily in distribution technology with ever-shrinking lifespans is in denial or in the dark. And no one wants to do away with pledge drives more than those of us who have to go on air and conduct them.

A content driven model is hugely desirable, but I need to understand just how the funding flow would change.

I’ll describe the situation I know best and maybe you can help us find ways to repair or replace it… we need the ideas!

Our station has more filmmakers, journalists, editors, videographers and educators creating local content and providing hands-on educational outreach to the community than it does administrators, technicians or management. I’m not sure how much leaner we could be as a pure local content provider with a lighter technical burden. We’d still need a studio, edit bays, field equipment, engineers to maintain them and some sort of master control room to insert the local programs into the stream you imagine we’d feed to the commercial tower. Plus, we’d have to sacrifice our multicast channels that our audience has decided they really like. We would save on transmitter and other transmission costs.

Unfortunately the content creation side of media is expensive… just what the newspapers have discovered – and they don’t record in high-def!

I suppose we could transition to some system whereby national content fed via a national television feed and local content was strictly available via web, but I see two issues with this: First local content would hit that digital divide – back to the “people who need PBS the most” point. Second, local stations tailor their programming to suit the needs of their community – this would go. It would be Nova, American Experience, History Detectives nationwide at the same time every week. Convenient for branding and promotion, but not very reflective of regional tastes. Our station runs local content in prime time 3 or more nights week – much more on weekends and daytime.

Also, even a web-based local public media outlet requires the same facilities, equipment and personnel that I outlined above – especially to deliver professional content that will draw eyeballs in a cluttered media environment.

Finally, this discussion (and others on the web) have focused heavily on programming content and journalism, but few have addressed the value of station-based education departments that provide tens of thousands of hours of early childhood literacy, media literacy and teacher professional development training to school children and school districts throughout the country. Your pledge dollars support these activities, too. Where do those resources go in the FPBS?

April 14, 2010 11:50 PM

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Here is my response to the provocative site PBS revolution and the thoughtful post by John Proffitt posted yesterday.