James Hibberd from The Hollywood Reporter posted today on The Live Feed blog about a soon-to-be-released Deloitte study that says young people are watching less TV these days. From the post:
Young Americans just aren’t watching TV like they used to.
Put another way, the older you get, the more you watch, according to a report due out Thursday from Deloitte indicating that “millennials,” the generation of ages 14-25, watch just 10.5 hours of TV a week.
That compares with 15.1 hours for those belonging to Generation X (ages 26-42), 19.2 hours for baby boomer (43-61) and 21.5 hours for matures (62-75).
I have no doubt that Deloitte’s data is correct, and that the age 14-25 demographic does in fact watch less broadcast TV…broadcast being the key word there. What I would like to see is whether that means the demographic truly watches fewer TV programs, or is simply consuming that content in other formats. There are a variety of ways to watch TV shows that don’t involve planting yourself on the couch every Thursday night at 8pm CST/9pm EST. For instance, DVR numbers in general are up, but presumably a younger demographic is more likely to watch full episodes online. And finally, there’s always the tried and true process of purchasing or renting full season DVDs. The net result could be that the younger demographic called out in the Deloitte study is in fact watching as much or more TV content, they’re just doing it in a very different way than their parents or grandparents. From a TVLoop community perspective, that explanation would make a lot more sense given the increasing popularity of our social networking applications and the recently launched TVLoop.com destination site.
Leave a Reply