Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The hyper-fragmentation of consumer choice across all screens is reducing the share of choices they make to watch a TV channel. That’s among the top findings coming out of the latest edition of Nielsen’s “Total Audience Report.”

The report, which was released to clients Thursday, is the first to publish shares of channels received and viewed by the average American household in a while.

It shows the average number viewed has fallen to less than 10% of the channels they receive.

That’s down dramatically from the last time Nielsen published such data, which showed the average was still in the double digits....

While broadcast viewers are thought to represent a more traditional TV audience than those watching cable, a new report says they are actually less likely to watch programming live than their cable counterparts, especially if the network in question is The CW.

That information comes from TiVo Research's Q2 State of TV report, which was released today. The quarterly report tracks time-shifting using TiVo's Media TRAnalytics data set, which anonymously aggregates set-top box data from more than 2.3 million households including TiVo owners and other cable providers.

According to the study, while the vast majority of TV viewing continues to be live, broadcast network prime-time viewing is more likely to be time-shifted than cable programming. Twenty-six percent of broadcast prime-time programming was time-shifted during the second quarter (23 percent overall was watched in the C3 window, from the same day to three days later; the other 3 percent was time-shifted four to seven days). In total day viewing, 20 percent of broadcast programing was time-shifted....

The study -- which is part of an ongoing series of research commissioned by the Council for Research Excellence to understand the nature of watching TV in the current viewing environment -- was conducted by Nielsen Consumer Neuro, which utilizes a variety of biometric measurement techniques to understand people’s conscious and unconscious interaction with media.

The findings of the study, dubbed “The Mind of the Viewer,” were described as preliminary, especially the part testing response to people-meter prompts, but it suggested that the kinds of media distractions impacting the way people consume media may also be impacting the way the industry measures how people consume media.

“We live in the age of distraction,” Carl Marci, chief neuroscientist at Nielsen, remarked, adding: “People make interesting choices with technology.”

When it comes to interacting with people meters -- the technology that is the basis for producing national TV’s advertising currency, Nielsen national TV ratings -- 25% of Nielsen people-meter panelists participating in the study did not respond to their prompts because they were looking at a second screen when the meter prompted them with a light....