Reports from the media measurement company Nielsen have dropped one of the features with which the company is arguably most associated: the idea of a television ‘channel’. MediaPost reports:

Nielsen said it had dropped one of its most popular features — data showing how many channels the average TV household receives — because in a digital, time-shifted multichannel universe, there no longer is a “consistent” meaning for the term “channel.”

People watch their television time-shifted through DVRs, VCRs and VoD, through computer screens and smartphones, alongside other media such as their laptop screens and they flick with their remotes whenever the momentum drops. They still watch programmes, of course – and Nielsen’s data will measure those audiences. But they don’t tune in to channels anymore. The ‘how many channels’ statistic, which – as you’d imagine – showed an ever-widening number of choices, makes no sense in a world where to answer to that question is effectively ‘infinite’:

In 2008, the last year for which Nielsen reported the data, the average U.S. household had 130.1 TV channels available to it, but on average, “tuned” only 17.8 of them, according to Nielsen’s definition of channel tuning. That means that the average TV households was only watching about 14% of the channels they had available to them. The percentage of channels the average TV household tunes to had been declining over the years that Nielsen has been reporting that data.

Long Live the Channel

The last sentence there – ‘The percentage of channels the average TV household tunes to had been declining over the years that Nielsen has been reporting that data” – is pretty telling. Creating more opportunities to watch rubbish doesn’t mean that people will do so. Generally speaking, people only want to watch the good stuff, and that’s what has led the popularity of time-shifting and over-the-web television like Hulu and iPlayer. At any given moment, it’s entirely likely that there is ‘nothing’ on broadcast TV but ‘anything you want’ via other means.

That said, the BBC still accounts for 1/3 of the UK’s TV-viewing; it won 13 of the 23 television BAFTA awards last year, with multiple nominations in almost every category. The BBC iPlayer site gets more than 1.4mn visitors a day. Could it be possible that these statistics are related? That a channel that cares about quality and service delivery might actually still mean something as a channel? I think so.

Telly: watched Extras and Dr Who over Christmas. Neither of them were as good as I’d hoped. Otherwise, I watched The Most Annoying People of the Year on BBC 3 through iPlayer, which was quite possibly the bitchiest thing I’ve ever seen, in a good way. In other people’s houses I was subjected to seemingly dozens of TV talent shows and shouty soaps.

Books: Ludmila’s Broken English by DBC Pierre is an excellent read, though not quite up to the standard of Vernon God Little, IMHO. The book has two separate threads which are well-created but then brought together rather clumsily in the finale. Imperium — Robert Harris — his worst book to date, sadly, though still a good read for a train journey. For self-improvement, I managed to get through a few more chapters of Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, too. I’ve got his book about the Thames lined up once that’s finished, some time in 2009.

Papers: My normal diet is freesheets — the Metro and the London Shite. Staying at relatives’ houses meant a shock switch to The Torygraph and the Daily Mail. How do people find the time? And why do they bother? Also enjoyed my regular doses of Uncut, Private Eye and the Economist.

Online: I’ve been offline for most of the time over the last two weeks, which was a very good idea and means I’m keen to get stuck into those 300 unread feeds.

Games: do these count? Anyway, much of my break was spent with The Witcher, which I can thoroughly recommend to old-school CRPG fans. Also developed a crippling addiction to fab puzzler The Lost Treasures of Montezuma.

.…Findings show that [in the US]:

Half of those surveyed said that they would turn to network television for immediate news information (NB: 66% in the UK)
The next most popular source was the radio (42%)
37% of consumers would use daily local newspapers
33% cable news or business networks
25% of those interviewed would rely on Internet sites of print and broadcast media
6% would turn to Internet user groups, blogs and chat rooms (24% in the UK)
On average, says the report, consumers are four to six times more likely to feel that traditional media is more trustworthy than emerging news sources for news they feel is most interesting.

.…For entertainment, consumers most often picked traditional lifestyle media as the most trusted source. However, Internet blogs, user groups and chat rooms were selected next most often, followed by weekly or monthly general interest and news magazines.

.…52% of the consumers surveyed anticipate they will continue to mostly trust and rely on traditional news sources. However, 35% expect they will trust and rely on both emerging news and traditional news in the future, and 13% anticipate they will trust and rely mostly on emerging media.

Print consumption has remained static at three hours a week in the past two years, as time spent online has doubled from two to four hours. Viewers are also spending more time watching television, up from 10 hours to 12 a week.

The adoption of broadband is shown to have a very positive effect on online consumption:

In France, where 79 per cent of online households have broadband connections, the typical user is online for five hours a week, compared with only three hours a week in Germany, which has a broadband penetration rate of 42 per cent.

Interestingly, the report identifies no losers in its survey, only increasing media consumption all round. Once again, the idea that traditional media are being driven into bankruptcy as our lives move online is shown to be not strictly true. Since there are no more hours in the day, one can only assume that the real losers are books, fresh air, face-to-face socialising and sleep. At the risk of sounding like my mum, this is not a development I can wholeheartedly welcome as positive, as much as I love the net.

However, the averages supplied in the headline statistics mask some clear differences in consumption patterns based on age:

The research found “a very clear new media/old media generational divide”, Mr Mulligan [research director at Jupiter] said. Under-25s now spend six hours a week online, half the time they spend watching television but three times the hours they devote to print.

So, the average amount of time spent online is four hours, but young people are up to six hours, and they’re watching less TV and reading less. It seems as though the implication of this is that the trends are reversed at the age of 25. Older people are watching a lot more TV and reading more papers and magazines. Their internet use must be far less than double what it was, to compensate for the six hours consumed by younger people.

Thanks, Antony