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Americans are now spending as much time using the Internet as they are watching television, and the amount of time people spend on the Internet has increased 121 percent over the last five years, according to a survey published Monday by Forrester Research.
While people younger than 30 years old have spent more time with the Internet than television for several years, Forrester’s survey shows that this is the first year that people in older age groups are also doing so. The amount of time spent on the Internet for personal uses tails off among older groups, ranging from about 12 hours a week for adults under 30 to about eight hours for people over 66 years old.
At first glance, this seems like further evidence of the much ballyhooed, if statistically suspect, trend of cord-cutting, whereby people transition from watching television to streaming online video. Pay TV subscriptions in the United States are down this year. In addition, wireless carriers like Verizon and Sprint have been encouraging the idea that faster new wireless networks could serve as a substitute for landline broadband services. So cable companies that bundle broadband access with cable television service are seeing threats on multiple fronts.
Forrester’s survey does show a significant increase in the number of people using the Internet to watch streaming video; 33 percent of adults surveyed this year said they use the Internet to watch video, up from 18 percent in 2007.
Yet the amount of time people spend with their televisions remains relatively stable. (By contrast, the survey found that people were spending significantly less time listening to the offline versions of radio and reading printed newspapers and magazines.)
The rise of the Internet is not necessarily leading to a drop in television consumption because the Internet, and particularly the mobile Internet, simply creates more opportunities for people to consume media, said Jacqueline Anderson, an analyst at Forrester who wrote the report. Until recently the supermarket checkout aisle was not seen as a prime opportunity for media consumption.
But the survey did not address directly a vital question: whether people who are watching streaming video on their televisions consider themselves to be watching TV or using the Internet. So some television replacement could be hidden behind this ambiguity, if people who are watching Internet content through set-top boxes or Internet-connected televisions see that as television use. It is this activity, of course, that poses the real threat to the existing business model of cable and satellite television providers.
And it is clear that younger viewers are increasingly comfortable with the Internet as the place to watch their television.
“For the younger population, the TV is still important, but where they’re getting that content from is changing,” said Ms. Anderson. “For the generations that are coming up, that’s where we’re going to see the cut.”
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