Because of the recession, y'all watched a lot of TV this year

tvrecession

The Media Democracy Survey tries to ascertain America’s entertainment habits. It comes out every year, and this year’s edition just went live. As you might image, the terrible economy played a major role in the way Americans went about their business this past year. In fact, it turns out that Americans now watch (well, watched in the past year) an average of 18 hours of TV per week, which is up from 16 hours from last year. And this is TV on TV, not Hulu or anything like that.

Let that sink in: 18 hours per week spent sitting on a couch, watching TV. That works out to a little more than 2.5 hours of TV per day if you want to average it out like that, which might not make too much sense. How many Americans will sit there all day on Sunday to watch the NFL? (I tend to watch at least one soccer game per week, typically the FC Barcelona one when it airs. So there’s two hours right there.)

The story, though, is that Americans, strapped for cash, have returned to almighty TV to entertain themselves. It’s cheap and it gets the job done. So that’s not hard to understand.

The survey did touch on new forms of entertainment, including online entertainment consumption. Only 10 percent of Americans watch TV online (Hulu, downloads, etc.), but more and more people are buying video games, which is where I spend most of my entertainment hours. (New Dungeon Finder~!) And it’s people between the ages of 27-43 who are the fastest growing segment of gamers. That’s good news for Hollywood, provided it figures of digital distribution sometime before the year 3000: these people have money and they’re not teenagers who will download a movie just for the hell of it. Hmm, people with money, willing to spend it… why try to reach them? Madness!

So yeah, that’s about it. People were broke this year, so TV to the rescue. Not online TV, not fancy set-top box TV, but plain ol’ TV.

Hopefully it’s in HD!