Internet’s Impact on TV Viewership Slight, Study Finds

Gaining access to the Internet has little impact on the amount of time households spend watching television, according to a study by Nielsen Media Research that contradicts conventional wisdom in the TV and computer industries, as well as the findings of several earlier studies.

The study, released Wednesday, is one of the first to track households’ television viewing habits before and after acquiring Internet connections, and it found that TV sets were on in these homes about 26% of the time before and after they gained access to the Net.

Paul Lindstrom, vice president at Nielsen, cautioned that the results are based on a sample of just 72 households and that behavior was tracked over a relatively short period, but he said the study should be reassuring to the TV industry.

“TV viewing behavior is much more entrenched than even the people in the industry tend to give it credit for,” Lindstrom said.

But executives in the computer industry greeted the news with skepticism, saying it is inevitable that Internet usage will eat away at television viewing because that represents a huge block of discretionary time for most consumers.

“Common sense says that people aren’t always going to stay up later to surf the Net,” said George Bell, chief executive of Excite Inc., a leading portal site on the Internet. “It’s going to have to come out of television--that’s where all the time is.”

The impact of the Internet on television has serious implications for both industries, which increasingly see themselves in competition for the attention of consumers and the dollars of advertisers.

Donna Hoffman, a leading media researcher at Vanderbilt University, said the report is an important step in sorting out the impact the fledgling Internet is having on traditional media.

But she said that even in documenting consumers’ reluctance to turn off their television sets, the study raises new questions about whether TV continues to have consumers’ undivided attention.

“Nielsen is not measuring whether people are watching TV, just whether their TV is turned on,” Hoffman said. “Even if it’s borne out by future research that TV consumption doesn’t go down, you could hypothesize that viewers’ attention is being shifted, and that raises basic questions about the effectiveness of TV advertising.”

A recent study by America Online Inc. using Nielsen data showed that households that had Net access watched 15% less television than those that did not.

But Lindstrom said conclusions drawn from such studies may have been misleading because they did not track TV viewing habits before and after the Net was introduced into specific households. Instead, they relied on side-by-side comparisons of households with and without Net access, or depended unreliably on the recollections of survey respondents.

Wednesday’s study confirms that households with Internet connections tend to watch less television. But the Net didn’t erode TV viewing in these households; the households simply watched less television to begin with.

Nielsen executives say this is largely a demographic phenomenon.

Affluent and educated households tend to watch less TV in general, and are also more likely to become Internet users.

Even though the study shows the Net did not diminish television viewing, it did reveal subtle shifts in viewing patterns.

TV viewing by young males declined after the introduction of the Net into their households, for instance, while the TV appetites of young females did not diminish.

Lindstrom said that may show that other members of the household pick up the viewing slack when young males relinquish their position on the living room couch.

The Nielsen study was based on data culled from 72 households that acquired Internet access between October 1997 and April of this year. These were among the 5,000 households that Nielsen monitors on an ongoing basis to develop ratings information widely followed in the television industry.