| MUMBAI:
US media research company Nielsen's new TV/Internet Convergence Panel, which electronically
measures both television and Internet usage in the same homes, has found that
television viewing and online video streaming are complementary activities. According
to the convergence panel, the heaviest users of the Internet are also among the
heaviest viewers of television: the top fifth of Internet users spend more than
250 minutes per day watching television, compared to 220 minutes of television
viewing by people who do not use the Internet at all.
Nielsen found that the reverse is true as well -- the lowest consumers of television
have the lowest usage levels for the Internet.
Nielsen also found that nearly 31 per cent of in-home Internet activity takes
place while the user is watching television, demonstrating that there is a significant
amount of simultaneous Internet and television usage.
Conversely, about four
per cent of television viewing occurs when the consumer is also using the Internet. The
Nielsen TV/Internet Convergence Panel, which launched last month, is the first
panel to use Nielsen technology and methodology to directly measure the interaction
between TV and Internet by the same people in the same household.
The sample consists of nearly 3000 people in more than 1000 households who were
either previously part of Nielsen's live
national TV sample and have agreed
to continue to be monitored by Nielsen, or new homes installed specifically for
convergence research.
Television viewing and Internet usage are collected in the panel using Nielsen's
electronic People Meter and downloadable NetSight meter software. The panel was
created as part of Nielsen's Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2) initiative,
which aims to measure video acros a variety of media platforms.
Other findings from Nielsen's TV/Internet Convergence Panel: --
Roughly 50 per cent of the Convergence Panel panelists had viewed some streaming
content online. The demos streaming the most included Female Teens (82 per cent),
Male Teens (64 per cent), Men 18-34 (57 per cent) and Men 35-54 (55 per cent).
-- Nearly 60 per cent of panelists and more than 80 per cent of people who watched
TV and used the Internet that month had simultaneous sessions -- watching TV
and being online at the same minute. This group tends to be very heavy users of
both TV and Internet.
-- Teens are the most likely demographic to have simultaneous TV/Internet usage,
but Adults 35-54 have the most simultaneous usage minutes. Nielsen
senior VP client insights Howard Shimmel says, "With our Convergence Panel
we can now, for the first time, observe what could only be guessed at before --
how television viewing and Internet usage interact and affect each other. It is
too early to draw any firm conclusions about behaviour but the early trends seem
to indicate that online usage is complementing, not substituting for, traditional
television viewing." | 
