Study: Fickle Young'Uns Betray Television

Wait wait wait, being right on the cusp of "Millennial" and "Gen X" (ie about a month until I switch) I take serious issue with the study's use of grouping and proclaiming 26 year olds fall into Gen X. Most of my older friends who were born in the early 80's want nothing to do with Gen X and would also take offense with being called a Gen Xer...although we all seem to be meh on the "millennial" name too. That said, I can say I probably blur the line between media since most time when I watch TV, I'm also on the computer and occasionally listening to music or talking to friends because growing up on TV and having short attention spans, my generation needs to multitask.

I too thought X'ers were older, Yogi, i'd have put you and i as y'ers that weird group between X and Millenial, just like my folks were in that wierd group between Boomer and Xer.
-
Anyway to answer James' question, i think its "moot." At some point i imagine houses will basically have a server with several devices running out from it, they'll all be hooked up to the net but some devices may be more focused on gaming while others are on sound and disply, you'll do different things on each but the "programming" will still come in over the internet.

Honestly, I am surprised the millennials even manage 10 hours of TV a week. 2 hours for the Fox Sunday cartoon block, and 3 or 4 hours of MTV shows, still leaves 4 or 5 hours unaccounted for. I find every single millennial watching Fringe, Heroes, Gossip Girl, Top Model, & House unlikely.
-
I mentioned this before, but I wonder if the gradual aging of TV hits has something to do with this as well (half the top 20 hits are at least half a decade old) - very few 16 year olds are suddenly going to start watching NCIS after ignoring it for the last six years. The few exceptions to this rule are reality shows with new "casts" every year (AI, Dancing). I highly suspect a top ten list of millennials' favorite shows would be highly weighted to shows that only recently came out - and the low survival rate of new shows means that the millenials have little to watch.
(Anecdotally, I've also heard that millennials tend to pick up new shows very slowly - either because their schedules are so busy they don't have time to slot them in, or (and I have personally heard this repeatedly) that so many new shows get cancelled instantly that there's no point in watching until season 2.)
-
As far as long term trends go: no, the amount of television millenials watch will grow over time, but slowly, and it will never hit the number of hours the other groups watch now (all the brackets will go down over time). There's simply too much other media for people to watch, not to mention the limitations of filmed TV shows - given my options for post-nuclear holocaust, why should I choose the limited budget Jericho set in scenery that looks no different from current farmland, watching people argue over wedding plans, when I could play Fallout 3 and shoot hideous mutants in the ruins of recognizable Washington D.C. landmarks?
-
@yogi: Err, sorry kid, but someone who was born in 1982, who was alive for the majority of the Reagan administration, who didn't see cell phones and internet access spread until high school, is not really culturally the same as someone born in 1994 and has had memories of these technologies being around as long as he can literally remember.
Though you are on to something about there being a distinct cultural shift, given the complete lack of interest in millenials in say, a show like Chuck, directed at 30 year olds.

After reading your Winter of Content post, this one made me think "15.1 hours a week? There's 15.1 hours a week of worthwhile stuff to watch?!" I'm sadly unexcited by both the fall and winter TV season this year. I either don't get or am not interested in some of the winter shows, and even my old standby favourites are either not grabbing me as much as usual (eg House) or departing (Pushing Daisies). Sigh. I miss being excited by TV.

Definitely moot. The world is moving actively toward asynchronous enjoyment of entertainment, the video game model. The only times people will gather to “watch” something with a big audience will be “events” real, i.e. the Superbowl, or programmer made and advertising hyped, Gossip Girl the reunion show live. The rest will be a combination of what you want when you want, and collaborative, for example everyone in a group posting funny quips on Facebook (as my kids do now) while watching Gossip Girl, because they have decided to do it as a group, not because it happens to be on Monday's at 8:00. TIVO started this, the Web is rapidly advancing the transformation and we will all look back in ten years and not quite remember the concept of “watching” a series over the course of a 26 episodes as presented by some network programmer, because we won't care when that programmer wanted us to watch it. The death march of network TV original content has started, the only real question is when it finally dies.

As a baby boomer I can't tell you how happy I am that this is the case. I used to have to watch something, now when there is nothing on my 700 plus channels, I read Tuned In, or other useful and interesting stuff. It is a much better world. You just don't sit and watch Kath & Kim anymore because there is nothing else to do between Earl and 30 Rock.

I wouldn't say that release dates will become entirely meaningless - they still have quite a bit of power in both music and movies. Besides, it is far easier to throw an mp3 player at someone to hear a 3 min song than it is to get them to catch up on a 45 min episode because you want to talk to them about it.
No, I think that, while live viewing will drop tremendously, the "catch-up" window will remain quite small (any longer and an episode stops becoming a topic of conversation). I'd estimate, in a decade, a breakdown of roughly 30/35/20/10/5 of Live/Within ~24 hours/~72 hours/1 week/longer for when people watch a given tv show vs. its air date.
-
As you said yourself, the #1 reason why things won't sit unwatched is because people will want to talk about it, either in person or over the internet. And no one will care that you just got done watching the "Company Man" episode of Heroes from two years ago and thought it was awesome.

@Tom Shaw, yeah you're right, I can hardly claim much of any relation to my cousins born in the early 90's other than blood. And even though most of us didn't have cell phones in high school, my age group was also the ones to grow up with PCs all our lives which I'm not sure Gen X can claim. I would think defining generations might become smaller in time length due to such technological shifts between the older and younger people of a 10 or 15yr generation that cause the major cultural shifts.

@Tom Shaw: The Daily Show + The Colbert Report = 4 hours a week. If you need help with your accounting :p.

But even then, as a "millennial," I watch everything on the internet. I find myself often listening to the radio (so I can do things online while occasionally listening to sports) more than I do watching TV.

Re: age issues - it's so hard to really classify the early- to mid-20's. I'm 24, married, with a kid on the way. I know a lot of people around 21-25 who are still in school, and their watching habits are much different from mine.
`
But at the same time, I don't watch much TV myself, so I guess I do fit with the demographic. My wife and I make time to watch Chuck and Lost, and other nights that we're home, we watch local news over dinner and then toss a movie in or play video games. We do watch around 10 hours a week, but that usually includes a Packer game.

As a quintessential Baby Boomer I mumble to the masses.....

"Get off my lawn you rapscallions."

http://obbop.wordpress.com/