Nielsen: Digital Video Viewing On Rise

Nielsen’s new cross-platform video analysis finds daily TV viewing is off slightly but online video viewing is surging, so that overall time spent with media content has risen.

The Q2 2014 Cross-Platform Report out today finds that daily time watching traditional live television is still more than four and a half hours per day, which is down a bit from a year ago, depending on whether the age range is 18-34 (2%), 35-49 (1%) or 50-64 (2%).

Digital video consumption daily though is up among the 18-34 group by 53%, to 35 minutes; among the 35-49 group by 80%, to 26 minutes, and even up 60%, to 19 minutes, among those ages 50-64. “It’s not just a young versus ‘older’ story,” Dounia Turrill, SVP Insights at Nielsen, said in an introduction to the report.

“Today, content is delivered and consumed through competing deliver platforms, networks and screens,” Turrill said in the report. “Never before have we seen this level of fragmentation and yet, the sum total of media consumed is growing. In fact, year over year among the younger 18-34 demo media consumption has grown 4% overall, 2% among Hispanics, 8% among blacks and 10% among Asians.”

Smartphone use is really surging. The devices have a 72% penetration in the United States, and tablets are up to 39% now, Nielsen said.

UPDATE: Nielsen has posted the full report at this link. (This story has been amended to correct the link.)

Kent Gibbons

Kent has been a journalist, writer and editor at Multichannel News since 1994 and with Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He is a good point of contact for anything editorial at the publications and for Nexttv.com. Before joining Multichannel News he had been a newspaper reporter with publications including The Washington Times, The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal and North County News.