Nielsen: Mobile, Online Video Hasn’t Put A Dent in TV Viewing

Media analysis firm Nielsen has looked at how people watch videos on phones, online, and on TV...and TV is still all that matters.

Media analysis firm Nielsen has released their quarterly Three Screen Report (PDF), examining how Americans consume video on mobile devices, on their computers, and on televisions. And while folks are tapping into more video with their phones and computers, it has yet to have any kind of impact on TV viewership. Almost 99 percent of all video watched in the U.S. is still being done on televisions…and people are watching more video than ever.

According to Nielsen, traditional TV usage in the United States is still at an all-time high, with Americans sucking down roughly 153 hours of television a month. (Do the math, people: that’s over five hours a day!) When broken down by age, though, certain trends seem to emerge: teenagers are most enthused about mobile video, watching an average of 6.5 hours of video on their phones every month, and young adults (ages 18–24) seem to be the most serious users of both online video and DVRs, timeshifting almost 6 hours of video a month and watching a little over five hours of video online.

Although mobile and online video still aren’t a very big slice of American’s video pie, both are gathering steam: consumption of mobile video has increased 52 percent since the first quarter of 2008, with more than 13 million Americans watching some form of mobile video. Use of online video saw a 13 percent increase over the same period, with over 131 million Americans tapping into some form of online video in the first quarter of 2009.