TVOLUTION

From the time television was invented in 1923 until about 2001, TV was a pretty static electronic device.  The average U.S. household had more than 1 TV set, but that TV set was largely in 2 rooms - the living room and the bedroom (or mulitple bedrooms).  If you wanted to see a TV show and you were not going to be home, you had to set your VCR to tape record the show and then you could play it back later.  Television has always been inventive - black & white with sound into color.  Then came better reception with cable, then pay TV with HBO, then more channels, then satellite, then home theaters, then plasmas, then LCD, all with ever expanding picture size....the medium has constantly evolved, but tracking how people consume TV has changed radically within the last 5 years.

For previous generations, TV was room based, passive entertainment.  For today's generation, TV is mobile and ubiquitous.  Consider how the future generations of America's television experiences will be:  A child's first TV exposure is usually to a big screen TV in their parents living room with the TV as babysitter playing an endless loops of Pixar films, Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon.  Then children will graduate to some type of mobile TV device, an ITouch, their first cell phone with video capability, a PSP, and also baby's first laptop.  Not much of TV consumption will change until college, when the TV experience goes almost completely onto a laptop.  There will still be the big event shows (Super Bowl, Oscars) that college students will watch on a big screen TV en masse, but for college students 99% of their TV viewing will be on a laptop.  Then after college graduation, and your first apartment, in comes the big screen TV again, and the laptop becomes a catch up device or for short form video content.  

It's not just that TV viewing habits such as time spent, and programming choices change, it's that there are some many devices that we use and go through in different stages of our adult lives that will detemine how we watch TV.  But make no mistake about it, research shows that with more ways to watch TV (laptops, TV, IPods), we're watching more of it:  http://en-us.nielsen.com/main/news/news_releases/2009/February/tv_internet_and_mobile