How much tv do americans watch

Download PDF Version. How parents use time and money. What is the impact of recoding travel activities in the American Time Use Survey. With nearly 80 percent of the population watching TV on a given day, and accounting for more than half of all the time Americans spend in leisure and sports, watching TV is the choice leisure activity for many Americans.

The ATUS is a Bureau of Labor Statistics BLS survey that collects information about how people spend their time, along with individual and household characteristics useful in understanding how people use their time. Using this information, BLS produces estimates of average time use for the civilian noninstitutional population ages 15 and older and various subpopulations.

It explores the richness of the data set by presenting statistics on when, where, and with whom Americans watch TV. One result has been clear since the survey began back in television dominates the time Americans spend in leisure and sports. In the —17 period, the U. This amounted to more than half This includes the time they spent watching live programming, viewing DVDs, and streaming shows on their TV sets, computers, and portable devices.

It does not include time spent viewing movies at a theater. There was some variation within the population in the time people watched TV, as shown in chart 1. Older people and people who were not employed spent the most time watching TV. Those ages 55 to 64 averaged 3 hours 14 minutes of TV time per day, and those ages 65 and older averaged an hour more 4 hours 14 minutes per day.

People who were not employed, which includes people of all ages who did not work for pay, watched TV for an average of 3 hours 49 minutes per day. The majority Parents of young children clocked the least TV time per day. With Parents with a child under age 6 averaged 1 hour 50 minutes per day of TV time. Those whose youngest child was between the ages of 6 and 17 averaged about one-quarter hour more TV time per day 2 hours 7 minutes.

On weekend days, employed people are less likely to work and students are less likely to attend class. This allows people to do other things—like watch TV. People watched TV about 45 minutes more per day on weekends than on weekdays. Nielsen has been measuring TV viewership since What becomes clear, on a closer look at viewership data, is that the eight-hours-a-day statistic is a very blunt figure, because viewing varies dramatically by age, race, and other variables.

Read: The future of TV is about couch shows vs. When Nielsen started measuring TV viewership, American households were averaging four and a half hours a day. This figure rose steadily over the course of the century, but the biggest jump came in the s, when it peaked at almost nine hours. This was a good thing, he said. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation.

Whatever else we might say about Facebook as an ever-optimizing attention-mining machine or the clickbaity excesses of YouTube, Americans still watch as much TV as they did before the creation of Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix.

Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Despite all the technological advances of the past few decades, the medium with the most users reached in was still radio, with million.

Live television was a distant second with million users reached, followed by smartphones with million. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more.