People are spending slightly less time watching scheduled broadcast TV and they are spending more time watching streamed on-demand TV online.
A new survey by Ericsson ConsumerLab dubbed "TV & Video Consumer Trend Report 2011" found that more than 44% of TV viewers are watching internet-based on-demand TV more than once a week while about 80% watch broadcast TV more often.
The survey covered 13 markets worldwide including Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK, the US and South Korea. In all, 22 qualitative and 13,000 quantitative interviews were conducted representing almost 400 million consumers.
Anders Erlandsson, senior advisor at Ericsson ConsumerLab, said that on-demand viewing is increasingly popular although broadcast viewing has remained as the most common way for people to watch TV.
"People want both broadcast and on-demand viewing to be available," Erlandsson said. "TV and video have not been negatively affected by the internet in the same way that print has; we just watch TV in many more ways than we did before."
The study also shows that social media usage has impacted the way we watch TV. More than 40% of respondents reported using social media on various devices such as smartphones and tablets while watching TV.
Erlandsson said that in-depth interviews - especially those in the US, which is a frontrunner in TV/video consumer trends - show how social media usage is impacting viewing. "The majority of families combined TV viewing with the use of Twitter, Facebook, texting, voice calls and forum discussions about what they watched," he said.