14 DAY TRIAL // Nielsen put forth some new statistics on the viewing habits of Americans, be it on TV, the Internet or mobile phones, and the numbers are interesting if not particularly surprising. Overall, Americans are watching more content on all platforms but TV still reigns supreme by a large margin. The number of people watching video on mobile phones saw a big increase as did the time spent watching videos online.
The report showed that, while the number of people watching online video content grew only 13 percent, the time they spent viewing online content went up 53 percent from last year to a nice round three hours. That may be impressive but these three hours a month pale in comparison to the 153 hours spent watching TV, clearly still the dominant force.
However, with YouTube showing no sign of slowing down and with services like the popular Hulu proving that even the large TV networks can have success online, Internet video may become a real competitor in the not-so-far future. Most major networks admit this and, while most of their efforts to date have been less than impressive, it seems that they are starting to finally understand how things are different online and see this more as an opportunity than as a threat.
Mobile video watching is also starting to become popular with the number of people using their phones for this growing by 52.2 percent from last year. Still, with 230 million mobile phone owners in the U.S. and with only 13 million using them to watch videos, there is plenty of space to grow. Interestingly enough though, the ones using phones are watching 3:37 hours a month more than the time spent online for this. But with phones delivering more and more performance and with cellular networks offering more bandwidth at lower prices, these numbers are expected to get a lot bigger in the coming years.