Traditional TV vs Streaming: How Viewer Habits Are Rapidly Changing
My household just wrapped up a week as a “Nielsen family,” recording our TV viewing habits for the powerful ratings organization, but our report failed to capture our shift in consuming media on mobile devices and computers.
A couple years back, rising cable fees led my family to forego the expensive cable package and invest in Wi-Fi enabled equipment and a few subscription services, a trend called “cord cutting.”
How Nielsen Still Measures Television Viewing
This month, my household participated as a “Nielsen Family,” filling out a survey of our viewing habits that still focuses only on “traditional” television viewing to gauge viewership for network and cable television. Nielsen’s ratings are still the main measurements of what people watch and buy, and their measurements help to set advertising rates and track viewership, purchasing and media habits.
Nielsen now tracks online and streaming media consumption as well as “traditional” television viewing, but it is still best known for the diaries and set-top boxes that track household television viewing habits.
The Gap Between Traditional TV Diaries and Real Media Use
For one week, my family of four meticulously tracked our television viewing on the paper diary Nielsen provided, sharing what shows we watched, or even those times when the television was on but nobody was in front of it.
What I tucked into an envelope and mailed back to Nielsen, however, is a far cry from what was actually going on in my home. I marked most time slots in the diary with an “X” indicating the television was “off” most of the week.
The Rise of Streaming and Mobile Media Consumption
But, that didn’t mean my family wasn’t consuming media via the television screen. My husband and I watched movies, several documentaries and episodes of “Mad Men” and “Downton Abbey” on Netflix. My children watched shows from PBS, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network after school and all weekend long, but they viewed them through our Wi-Fi enabled Blu-Ray player or online with my computer.
According to the latest research, my family is part of a rising trend of both cutting cable out as well as ramping up media consumption on the computer, tablet and smartphone. But the Nielsen survey we just completed doesn’t capture our shift from network and cable television viewing to streaming media consumption and online watching, hinting the company’s well-known television viewership surveys could be losing their usefulness in the industry.
Nielsen doesn’t offer a place for watching Netflix, Hulu Plus or other streaming services on its diaries, even if people watch them through their televisions, which may skew the picture of how people truly “watch TV” in the connected age.
What New Research Reveals About Viewer Habits
The research firm tracks mobile usage and streaming viewership separately, and its results support the picture my family’s Nielsen diary portrayed. More households eschew pay-cable service in favor of streaming video, a study Nielsen released earlier this month reports. The firm reported a 23 percent increase in U.S. households that receive only basic broadcast television, but pay for broadband Internet service.
These results dovetail with a survey by InMobi, which revealed people are spending more time-consuming media on mobile devices than they do watching their televisions.
InMobi surveyed 20,000 mobile consumers last fall, revealing more than a quarter of them spend most of their media-viewing time on a mobile device, as compared to only 22 percent who spend most of their media time watching television. However, surveys such as InMobi’s often measure subjects already known as tech-savvy or mobile users, and might miss out on other segments of the population.
Why Media Measurement Must Evolve for the Digital Age
The shift in media consumption holds big implications for television networks, cable companies, media providers and advertisers, which need to find ways to satisfy new media-consumption habits while still bringing in revenue. Traditional ways to measure viewership only capture part of the picture, leaving the television and advertising industries lagging behind.
Nielsen’s measurements influence television and cable network traffic, advertising rates and programming decisions. The organization still measures media consumption vertically, however, separating “television” viewing from “media” consumption, perhaps only affording a glimpse of the big picture for companies to base their decisions on.
Non-mobile online media consumption won out overall, InMobi reports, gaining nearly a third of the survey share, underscoring a sea change currently underway among American TV viewers leaving behind their sets for the computer screen.
My family, like the “typical” American family highlighted by current research, is pulling away from network and cable television in favor of more streaming media consumption on smartphones, tablets, computers and through Wi-Fi enabled devices, such as Blu-Ray players and gaming systems.
Companies like Nielsen and InMobi are just starting to document this trend, and its bigger, future impact on the media and entertainment industries is still to come.
