The rise of TV and internet multi-tasking

Until Christmas, I'd been watching TV on a beaten up Matsui that was left behind when my step-mum's tenants left in 2001. It was roughly the size of a shoe box and had a very unreliable remote, and not surprisingly I didn't watch it much. It made far more sense to replace it with a deliciously large Mac screen, so now we use an Eye TV Hybrid* that shares those 23" with overflowing browser windows, Twitter clients and music players. It works for us. Simultaneous TV and internet use is becoming more common, according to Nielsen 's new Three Screen Report, with 59% of those surveyed using TV and internet at the same time. The amount of time spent using them together has increased 35% in a year, up to an average 3 hours 30 minutes a month. (It's approaching that a day in our house.) This could be seen as bad news for the programme makers, who might think they have to struggle even harder to maintain the interest of a restless audience. But the survey found that 34% of internet users would use the TV at the same time, compared to just 3.1% of TV users who used the web simultaneously. That might reinforce the image of the restless web user with the short attention span, but this multi-tasker also offers an opportunity for programme makers to explore that cross-promotion and how tools like Twitter are used as a real-time back channel. Nielsen also found that the average American watched 35 hours of live TV every week as well as two time-shifted hours, while online video use rose 16% from the previous year. Around 44% of online video is viewed at work, and mobile video grew 57% from 2008 to 2009, largely down to the growth of smartphone ownership. * Thank you, Father Christmas.