Most folks who watch TV programs online seem to be forgetful types.  Nielsen says these customers either forgot to watch a favorite TV program, or forgot to set their DVR to record it.  12% of them are sneaking a peek at work - watching a program online in their cubicle - we can only assume this is during lunchtime. LOL!

Nielsen reports that 54% of people who watch a TV program online forgot to watch it on their television set when it originally aired.   Another third of these users forgot to set their DVR to record their favorite program when it aired on TV.

They also use online viewing of TV programs to catch up because they missed a large number of episodes (47%), or to catch up on episodes from a previous season before the new season begins (33%).   Another 18% use online viewing to watch an episode they missed because someone else in the household was watching another program at the same time as their favorite show.

Interestingly, the Nielsen research shows that viewing TV programs online is a solitary activity.   Half of the people say they “never” watch these online TV programs with another person.  Another 35% say they “rarely” view programs online with another person.

Here is another interesting - but not surprising - nugget from the NSI study.  While Hulu gets a lot of publicity as the place to watch TV programs online - they are blown away by You Tube.   Hulu had over 600,000 video streams of TV programs during January - but You Tube had 6.6 million streams.  You Tube streams grew by 3 percent over December- while Hulu was flat.   ABC television had a little less than 130,000 streams - but that was an increase of 71% from December.  The third place site - Yahoo - had a little over 221,000 streams - a drop of 9%.

The total streams - for all online sites - is impressive at 11 billion for the month of January.  That activity came from just under 143 million unique users - a jump of 5% from a year ago.  These folks spent an average of just over three hours online each time they viewed a TV program.

Jim

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 9:11 am and is filed under Willi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.