NEW YORK – The vast majority of TV viewing by U.S. adults is done on a TV screen, despite the proliferation of other viewing options, says new data from Neilsen.
According to the company’s fourth quarter 2016 Comparable Metrics Report, over 92% of all viewing among U.S. adults (18+) happens on the TV screen, more than the share of PCs, smartphones and tablets, combined.
Specifically, the report found that American adults spent 509 billion minutes viewing on TVs in the quarter and another 63.6 billion viewing on TV-connected devices. Viewing video on PCs accounted for 31.7 billion minutes, smartphone video was 10.9 billion, and tablets were 4.4 billion, for a combined share of viewing of 7.6%.
Nielsen says its Comparable Metrics Report series is an in-depth study of users and usage – averaged across the U.S. population – with the purpose of aligning methodologies and metrics to display an “apples to apples” view of consumption across TV, Radio, TV-connected devices, PCs, smartphones and tablets.
“What we found was that contrary to the popular narrative that smaller screens were taking away time from the TV glass, when we looked deeper we found that overall time spent viewing on the TV had the most minutes among every age or ethnic demographic looked at”, said Nielsen’s SVP audience insights Peter Katsingris, in the news release. “In some cases the share of viewing was as much as 97%.”
