According to Nielsen, the average American watched 4 hours, 34 minutes of TV per day during the 2006/2007 season. That's an increase of 36 minutes per day from a decade earlier.
Looking further forward, eMarketer estimates that TV advertising spending will reach $75.4 billion in 2012, up from $67.8 billion in 2007—a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of only 2.1%.
Online advertising spending, in contrast, is forecast to grow annually at 19.2% over the same period and will overtake TV advertising spending in the US within 10 years.
"At eMarketer, we believe TV viewers will watch more, not less, TV content in the future," says Ben Macklin, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the new report, TV Trends: Consumers Demand Control. "But they will be accessing and viewing it in different ways from the past."
eMarketer estimates that by 2012 nearly 25% of all TV content watched each day will be time-shifted, on-demand, on the Web or on a mobile device.
"Video-on-demand, digital video recorders, the broadband Web and 3G mobile phones are giving consumers new ways to access and watch TV," says Mr. Macklin.
Key TV and Internet metrics show that, in the US, the size of the Internet audience is rapidly approaching the size of the TV audience.
"Some 190 million Internet users will be regularly watching online video in the US in 2012," says Mr. Macklin. "And as bandwidth to the home increases, an increasing proportion of the online video content consumed will be professionally produced."
"Furthermore," Mr. Macklin adds, "by 2012, 60% of TV households will have VOD capability and 40% will have a DVR service, giving consumers unprecedented control over the TV content they want to watch."
This does not spell the end of the traditional live TV broadcast or the traditional 30-second ad break, but TV advertising will need to evolve if it is to keep pace with consumer usage.
"Traditional TV broadcasters and advertisers have little time to wait to reinvent themselves and their organizations to take advantage of the interactive, on-demand and mobile video future," says Mr. Macklin.