How much TV do we watch?

If you've been reading this blog, or know me at all, you know that I really like TV. I also have a huge obbession with the TV ratings,  however unfortunalty due to the fact the Oztam is one of the suckiest orginisation ever, they have this wierd obbession with keeping the ratings a secret, and rarely release ratings quickly, never release demo's and only give us the 5 capitical city ratings and never the final, unless you want to pay. Its a very sucky system so I stick mainly to US ratings, because I need my fix somehow, but today, something momentous has happened, Oztam has temporily forgetted how precious its ratings are and released a report! A report! one that isn't grossly outdated and about something borring. No they've released the first ever Australian Multi-screen Survey! Forget the fact that the rest of the world has been doing this for years, and the report and press release are possibly the worst things ever written, riddled with inaccuracies, refusing to define terms, making the meaning murky, and giving numbers that aren't well defined. Yes it took me a good 3 hours to track down exactly where all of the numbers came from, and even then they weren't even on the Oztam site! Welcome to the world of mulit-screen reporting, and please, please, please do a better job next time. Its a good thing I'm a bored uni student with too much time on my hands.


The good news is I'm far from alone in my TV obbession. Infact Australians spend an average of 5 hours and 3 minutes a day watching TV ( a lot more than I do, see I'm not that bad), and a further 9 minutes a day streaming internet video (a heck of a lot less than I do). Another failing of the report is that all of the three companies colloborating all had different age brackets, so I'm not even going to attempt to look at age trends, however in the quilivant American report, it was very interesting to note that the caotrgy that used internet and mobile streaming by far the most was the 25-34 age bracket, not the college age 18-24 age bracket that I would have expected. Back on Australian shores, men watch more internet TV (62%) but marginally less actual TV ( 47%) proving what media experts have been saying all along, that the prime advertising catorgry is men, 18-34 (but really any 18-34) because they are the most rare and less accessable. Why Australia still goes by total people, over-populated by older people already set into their viewing habbits astounds me (or even worse, obbessing over the "grocery buying audience" eurgh, people statistics, they're important) and further proves just how sucky the Australian TV industry is.

Anyway compare this to the 4 hours and 52 minute that the average american watches, and additional 39 minutes of internet streaming video, which is rather a scary comparison, considering the very high penetration cable in america (90%) and the fact that this cable accounts for 74% of all viewing, Australians watch a lot of TV. Even including digital channels, full penetration is at 70% and digital only accounts for about 10% of all TV viewing, and pay TV only 15%.


Of course non of these figures includes downloads of TV shows, which probably won't have that big an influence on the total numbers, which are dragged up by the older population, who don't download, but for me personally, and probably in the 18-24 age bracket downloads certainly account for a huge amount of TV broadcasting. But what this basically means is that while Americans have more reason to watch TV (they also have a higher internet pentration 98% compared to 77%- a very scary figure- in Australia and an average of 3 TV's per household compared to Australia's 2.4 and although Australians have a higher percentage of people who own a working TV, 99% compared to 97% of Americans) Australians are watching much more TV. This could be slighly explained by our marginally higher life expectancy, although if you look at the age population graphs, they are almost identical, basically I think we just like watching TV.

here is the report if you're at all interested. I have to warn you, its pretty basic, and not very clear, but its better than nothing.