Did you know that the average American home now has more television sets than people? According to Nielsen Media Research, there are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people. While I was not surprised to learn that there are more TVs than people in the average home, I was surprised that there were only 2.73 TV sets per home. I figured the number would be closer to four… and that’s being conservative.
After all, if you consider how many parents allow their children to have TV sets in their individual rooms; the number of households with TVs in the kitchen; and the number of houses built with multiple gathering spaces (e.g. great rooms, family rooms, living rooms, etc.); add to that the popularity of flat-screen TVs, which now make it easy to put sets where they haven’t been before… and you would think the number of television sets an average family owns would be much higher than 2.73.
In fact, studies do show half of American homes have three or more TVs, while only 19 percent have just one. In 1975, 57 percent of homes had only a single set and 11 percent had three or more, Nielsen reports. Of course, there are always those families (like my aunt’s) who have close to 10 TVs. When you are visiting my aunt (who has 6 children) you can walk from room to room and continue watching the same show without missing any of what’s on the screen.
The Nielsen study also revealed that in the average home, a television set is turned on for more than a third of the day – eight hours, 14 minutes. That’s an hour more than it was a decade ago. Another interesting tidbit discovered by the Nielsen research: the average person watches four hours, 35 minutes of television each day. In addition, a relatively new finding from the study shows TV viewing among teenagers was flat or even declining, a trend blamed on the Internet or the popularity of electronic games and other devices.
How many TV sets do you own? How many hours of TV do watch on an average day?