Traditional TV Dominates Video, Radio TSL Increases a Bit

If you believe everything you read on the internet, it may look like a revolution is taking place in how people consume video. There are any number of reports telling us that more and more people are watching television shows and movies on small-screen mobile devices or computer screens instead of home TVs. Looks can be deceiving. Nielson reports that time spent watching video on TV screens dwarfs watching on all other types of screens combined.

The Nielsen data were compiled between September 26 and December 25, 2016, and include adults in the US aged 18 years of age and older. Here’s what they found.

Do the math and it turns out 92.4% of viewing time was spent watching TVs and TV-connected devices with PCs, smartphones and tablets sharing the remaining 7.6%. Put another way, for every hour spent watching television and movies on PCs, smartphones and tablets, a bit more than 12 hours and 17 minutes were spent watching on TVs and TV-connected devices. It’s no contest, according to Forbes.

Meanwhile InsideRadio is reporting, that despite an avalanche of audio alternatives, radio listeners spent slightly more time with the medium in fourth quarter 2016 year-over-year, according to Nielsen’s latest Comparable Metrics Report. The definitive quantitative tally of media usage shows radio’s reach among adults 18+ crept up slightly to 92.7% during an average 2016 week compared to the same period one year-ago (92.5%).

Radio maintained its position as the country’s top reach medium, again outperforming TV (88.8%), smartphones—app + web (82.8%) and social media on smartphones (73.2%). However, TV gained more than two percentage points in reach, up from 86.4% in Q4 2015.

The time that listeners spent with radio also grew slightly year-over-year to 844 minutes per week for the average adult 18+ user, up from 837 minutes one year earlier. That amounts to about 2.1 hours per day that radio users spent with the medium in Q4 2016.

That radio inched up in both reach and time spent is significant when the popular consumer press narrative is that the medium is declining. “These numbers don’t move dramatically, they move glacially,” notes Katz Media Group executive VP of strategy and analytics Stacey Lynn Schulman. “Unless you are in the smartphone digital category, we don’t see legacy media having big changes and certainly not in a positive direction. What you’re seeing is a testament to the medium and its strength and longevity.”