Americans changing how they consume visual media

In its quarterly Cross-Platform Report released Thursday for Q3 2011, media tracking company Nielsen revealed some startling trends about how Americans are consuming media.

"Americans spend more than 33 hours per week watching video across the screens, according to the latest Nielsen Cross-Platform Report," the NielsenWire blog detailed. "But how they’re consuming content — traditional TV and otherwise — is changing. Demonstrating that consumers are increasingly making Internet connectivity a priority, 75.3 percent pay for broadband Internet (up from 70.9 percent last year). ... Homes with both paid TV and broadband increased 5.5 percent since last year."

After sifting through the data, the New York Times successfully teased out that "Americans ages 12 to 34 are spending less time in front of TV sets, even as those 35 and older are spending more. ... The divide along a demographic line reveals the effect of Internet videos, social networks, mobile phones and video games — in short, all the alternatives to the television set that are taking up growing slices of the American attention span."

One of the most prominent findings of the report is regarding homes that choose not to pay for cable or satellite television, but do pay for hi-speed Internet. Although such homes account for only 4.5 percent of America's "television homes," that figure has risen 22.1 percent during the past year.