According to the second quarter Nielsen Total Audience Report, which focuses on what options consumers have in addition to how they use them, behaviors and usage are unique to the device being used. Consumers still spend most of their time on traditional platforms, but they also look to explore the wide range of content channels made available by new media.
Even with more outlets and devices competing for audiences’ attention, viewers aren’t moving away from live TV as much as they did a year ago, according to Nielsen’s second-quarter 2016 Total Audience Report released today. The report found that live TV declines are starting to level off. In the second quarter of this year, adults spent an average of four hours, nine minutes watching live TV, which is down two minutes from the same period a year ago. But there was an eight-minute decrease from 2Q 2014 to 2Q 2015.
The hyper-fragmentation of consumer choice across all screens is reducing the share of choices they make to watch a TV channel. That’s among the top findings coming out of the latest edition of Nielsen’s Total Audience Report. The report, which was released to clients Thursday, is the first to publish shares of channels received and viewed by the average American household in a while, and it shows the average number viewed has fallen to less than 10% of the channels they receive.
You still love television. You use your tablet more than ever. And now you are as likely to have paid services like Netflix or Amazon Prime as you are to have a DVR service. Those are some of the findings of a study released this week by Nielsen that measured how we are consuming media (increasingly on devices we hold in our hands), and how much live TV we still watch (an average of more than five hours a day).
That’s just one of the findings of Nielsen’s Q1 2016 Total Audience Report. This year’s version also found U.S. adults spent 10 hours, 39 minutes a day consuming media in this year’s first quarter. That’s up an hour from a year ago, and it’s a result of a substantial increase in smartphone and tablet usage. But it’s a different story among millennials. Live plus time-shifted TV has remained relatively stable.
Nielsen’s latest Total Audience Report shows you can’t lump millennials into one big group when it comes to the way they consume media. Viewers 18-34 have greatly different preferences — and use different devices — depending on whether they live in someone else’s home, are on their own without kids, or have a family.
Exclusives
Nielsen’s second-quarter 2015 Total Audience Report shows that despite growth in digital video use, TV accounts for half of all media use for weekday and weekends between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. TVB President Steve Lanzano says the report shows “that TV remains consumers’ medium of choice and as such, continues to be the most effective and powerful marketing medium.”
The TV world may love to hate Nielsen, but now the measurement giant is arming media companies with a new report that could aid their fight against digital rivals. The message of Nielsen’s new Total Audience Report: comparing online video views with the audience of a TV program is an apples-and-oranges endeavor.
Average daily time spent watching traditional TV quarter over quarter decreased 12 minutes from 4 hours and 44 minutes to 4 hours and 32 minutes. Conversely, daily time spent using a smartphone increased 23 minutes, from 1 hour and 10 minutes to 1 hour and 33 minutes per day.
