The data are included in the latest Cross-Platform report from The Nielsen Company.
Americans as a group watch four hours and 36 minutes of live TV a day and watch Internet videos on a computer for one hour and seven minutes. Live TV watching is down by eight minutes year-over-year and watching videos on a computer is up six minutes.
The big overall gain is in smartphone use, up to an hour and 25 minutes a day in the second quarter, 21 minutes a day more than a year ago and up 37 minutes a day compared with the second quarter of 2012. See Nielsen’s chart included below.
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Over the course of a month an average American uses an app or surfs the Web for 43 hours and 31 minutes and watches videos on the smartphone an average of an hour and 41 minutes. App/Web use on a smartphone is up by nearly 11 hours a month in the second quarter, and video watching is up 32 minutes a month.
In general the older you are the more TV you watch and the younger you are the more time you spend watching video on a game console.
Nielsen slices and dices the data among age groups, race and ethnicity, and other measures. Here are a few highlights:
- Among all Americans adults 65 and older watch nearly 212 hours of TV a month, a full 30 hours more than the 50 to 64 year-old group and more than double that of adults aged 18 to 24.
- Gaming console usage is highest among 12 to 17 year olds, at nearly 18 hours, and lowest among adults 65 and older at just 27 minutes. In the first quarter of the year, 18 to 24 year olds led this category with more than 18 hours, but that group’s use of gaming consoles to watch video has dropped to 16 hours and 17 minutes.
- African Americans spend 206 hours a month watching traditional TV, compared with about 118 hours for Hispanic Americans and 83 for Asian Americans. Smartphone usage is also highest among African Americans.
The variety of delivery platforms available to consumers expands the opportunity for content producers, but given the Nielsen data we can expect that producers will put more effort and money into mobile platforms.
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