Do you think you’re spending too much time staring at a video screen?

According to a Nielsen study, the average person spends 8 hours a day looking at screens, whether on a TV, computer, mobile device or even an advertising screen in a grocery store checkout line.

The poll, reports an article in the New York Times, was the largest most intense survey undertaken by the TV monitoring service. Instead of relying on people’s memories of what they did, pollsters followed them around for several days, making note of when and how they looked at the myriad of screens all around their world.
The New York Times article writes, “The researchers found that television and video games attract the most undivided attention, while other actions (like listening to music) often occur while people are doing other things.” which shows that people really do prefer to lay back and relax when watching video, and that we are in the right business at the right time to capitalize on that viewer market.

Read the full article here.

A recent Nielsen rating report of a few days ago found that only 3.9-percent of US households are still not ready for the digital transmission change over that is now scheduled for June 12th.

All TV stations were supposed to be ready by last February 17th, but the feds canceled that date in an 11th hour decision, due to their concern that the people that didn’t have their free government-issued receivers set up would be without broadcast television.

Oh, my goodness, how horrible!

Are we such a mindless collection of TV-controlled sheep that we can’t get along without TV so badly that the government is actually concerned for our TV-driven lifestyle? When did TV become so important that we can’t live without it? I’d love to see the government give the same concern for such important issues as health care insurance, extremely high rates of unemployment and home foreclosures.

According to this Nielsen poll, the largest number of Americans that weren’t prepared for the DTV changeover wasn’t the “at risk” 55+ year-old TV owners as the government expected, rather it was the 30-something procrastinators waiting for… what..? Circuit City “Going Out of Business” bargains? The US commerce department spent almost a billion and a half dollars delivering coupons to people who requested their free set-top boxes that convert digital signals to analog.

If 5-percent of the people still don’t wish to comply, who cares? I think it’s asinine that the TV stations across the country have to hold their programming for these people who, perhaps, have better things to do than watch TV, which is probably why they haven’t gotten their set-top converter yet.

Read the news story from the Radio and TV Business Report here: Read the rest of this entry »