/ Craig Engler / 11:16 am Thu May 6, 2010

People can't accurately tell how much TV they really watch

The Economist has a fascinating special report about the current and future state of the TV industry, where they highlight the fact that most people can't accurately say how they really watch TV, or how much TV they really watch: tvchart.gif
"This helps explain one of the oddest and most consistent findings of television research: people seem unaware of their own behaviour. In surveys they almost always underestimate how much television they watch, and greatly overstate the extent to which they watch video in any other form (see chart 4). In particular, they underestimate their consumption of live television. One of Ms Pearson's subjects, a 27-year-old man, claimed to watch recorded television 90% of the time. In fact he watched live TV 69% of the time."
The whole special report is worth a read.

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  1. Wow, people in this survey watch 6 hours of TV a day and listen to the radio for 2 more? That’s a full time job.

    (Now if you counted in the time I spend surfing random websites and commenting on blog posts…..)

    1. I was going to smugly note that I watch literally no TV at all ever, because I don’t have one, but then I realized I’ve been on the internet at work for the last 5 or so hours, and will probably still be screwing around on the internet for another 3 or so.

  2. Dear lord, 350 minutes of TV per day?? I’m not sure I’m even home while awake for that long on average.

  3. Anyone thinking these numbers are high, remember that you can do many things at a time such as listen to radio while driving to and from work. I suppose some keep the TV on while eating, at least I do.

    @Craig Engler, you have some odd line breaks in your text…

  7. Hmm, yeah. Is this counting when you leave on a TV in the background, like a lot of people do with the radio? Say, during a hockey game, I’m not *always* parked in front of it staring at the screen (unless it’s a tense game). I might be doing something else — typing on my computer, knitting, cooking, doing chores. Ditto with the news at work.

    My boyfriend is another case — he watches TV on his iPhone on his commute. He likes to leave videos on to have some background noise while he’s working too.

    I mean, even so, I get home at 6 and I go to bed typically around midnight or 1 AM. I’d really have to be trying to get 350 minutes of TV in.

    I’m unclear on what that chart means. I suppose it’s the average consumption rate? If so, I find it hard to believe it isn’t massively skewed towards the people who don’t have full-time jobs and commutes taking up a big chunk of their day.

  8. they should give out badges for non-TV watching hipsters. maybe dwell magazine can sell them.

  9. *rolls eyes* I thought we dropped the “I watch no tv” smugness a while ago. Whatever activity you choose to take up your time with, it’s the quality that matters. Watching an interesting, well-produced show on (or from) TV will probably give you more to think and talk about than scrolling through the latest LOLCATS picspam.

  10. Time flies when you’re watching “Ow My Balls.”

    I’ll bet most people have a difficult time estimating how much time they do anything.

  11. I’d bet the discrepancy lies in people not wanting to admit how much TV they actually watch.

  12. Hipster smugness my ass, it’s “hippy” smugness for a bunch of us :D

    I had to trade in my smug card though; I used to not watch TV because meh, TV. Now I don’t watch TV because I’m too busy playing World of Warcraft and I can’t concentrate with TV in the background.

  13. If you remove the time spent watching commercials from the actual total then perhaps the self report would be more accurate.

  15. I wonder how they’re defining ‘watching’ precisely. To take yesterday as a random example [which I still remember], and calculating through midnight [for science!], the television was off until it occurred to me that something would have been recorded.

    Based on something I’d uploaded just before going off to see what I’d snagged, I turned the television on sometime after 21.38. Call it 9.45 for roundish numbers. Add up to five minutes, on the outside, navigating through menus to start the show, during which the little smartwindow was displaying the local news I wasn’t actually watching. And start.

    From ~9.50 to around 10.40, we watch the recorded show. Without adverts, I suppose it was around forty-five minutes long; allowing that the first few seconds of an advert can’t be perfectly missed while fastforwarding, plus the arguable observation of adverts for twenty to forty seconds [without casually watching the advert block, there’s no guessing when it’s over], and thumping the button to jump back by thirty seconds once the show’s back, catching probably twenty seconds of the last advert; that whole sequence probably happened four or five times.

    The television’s still on. Also in the DVR is a show I’d already watched a couple days ago, but saved; she hasn’t watched it yet. In no particular hurry to flee from the television, I hang around reading a book on a Kindle while she watches what I’ve seen, occasionally remembering to skip the adverts interrupting it. I’m not watching the show, since I’m reading a novel; but I can hear it. Does that count? Who knows.

    That show ends and gets deleted somewhere between eleven and eleven thirty, dropping us into FamilyGuy halfway through an episode. The DVR having stored that to date while she was watching 24, I went ahead and rewound it to the beginning and watched through it, fastforwarding through the adverts as they appeared. I happen to remember that the episode meant to end at eleven thirty ended for me at eleven forty-one, followed by another; I watched through that, skipping adverts until I was caught up to realtime. And that ended at midnight.

    So. Minute for minute, I was in proximity to the television from nine forty-five through midnight, that being 145 minutes. Which doesn’t bother me much. But a decent percentage of that time was incidental: I’m reading a novel, generally ignoring the television since it’s displaying something I’ve already seen.

    In the study, that’s accounted for by a guy reading a newspaper to the exclusion of watching television, which is quantified as watching television. To me, that sounds like misinterpreting the data to get a result. If I had the windows open on a warm day, watching television for twenty-four hours, I could probably use the same criteria to kick that up to hundreds of hours, simply because I’d also be ingesting the noises coming from neighbours’ televisions. It works out to be meaningless.

  16. I call shenanigans on the data — I’m barely at home and awake for that many hours, and my TV is not on all that time. If I’m a typical person with a typical job, where are they finding all the couch potatoes to skew the study? Or are they conflating it with other activities, like watching TV shows downloaded from the Web or saved to TiVO?

  17. Years ago in college, some teacher was doing research on peoples garbage (had to sign an non discloser agreement just view his slideshow in class when he was a guest speaker. I got up and walked out instead of signing. Got an A, yet I skipped the last 5 weeks and the final)Heard later from many others was that he would send out letters saying that their garbage was going to be picked through on such and such date. But they would actually start ealier than the date stated. The one thing that would disappear – Booze/beer/wine bottles. They would reappear the week after the collection was supposed to end in huge numbers…
    Moral – people are ashamed for no real reason about how they live their lives

  18. I wonder if the disparity can be explained partly with this: you’re more likely to remember interesting, entertaining, novel experiences, and devote more “brain time” to those experiences.

    With TV, we spend so much time watching the same thing over and over (commercials, news break-ins, title scenes) that we can “write-off” most of those minutes per hour.
    With internet video, it’s uncommon to watch the same videos over and over every day, so that amount is less. Plus, we’re usually searching for novelty (or commercial-free mass media).
    With radio, I don’t know. They still play the same things over and over, like on TV, but maybe because we tend to be multitasking when the radio is on — and not sitting, absorbed, staring at the speakers — our experiences with radio on tend to be more comfortably self-aware.

    Just an idea.

  19. TV is media, just like the alphabet. You can read classical literature, or you can read porn. The alphabet doesn’t care, and neither does the TV.

    You want “smug” ??? I don’t do texting, nor tweets.

  20. It has been known for a long time that self-reported data is problematic. Also, I have never heard anyone say anything good about Nielson, except for people who work at Nielson. Actually I have only heard people say very bad things about Nielson and their ability to accurately capture viewing numbers. I recall an industry insider at PAX 2008 absolutely slam Nielson, IIRC she actually laughed. Oddly, although the info-graphic is from Nielson, they are not mentioned in the article as far as I can see.

  21. Of course the data’s bogus. Look at the very bottom of the chart. It says “Source: the Onion”. Or somewhere about as reliable.

  23. it _could_ be explained by the type of questionaire used. people tend to guessing towards the middle.

    so most people will guess their habits are “medium”.
    depending on the scale you give, this tendency has great impact on results.

    if on the list of choices you give 5 hours is in the middle, more people will choose so than if 2 hours is in the middle.

  24. People exaggerate on surveys ? This surprises anyone ?

    People exaggerate on surveys when their egos are involved ? Even this surprises anyone ?

    Wow.

    I love how the news media always just assumes that surveys are 100% accurate.

    Moronic self-delusional Tea Party rednecks all claiming that they have PhDs ? -Check. Take is as gospel truth.

    Salary surveys which consistently inflate by at least 50% ? Check. Never question them.

    The list goes on and on.

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