Young people are ditching their television sets even faster than in previous years, according to new data, with traditional TV usage falling among viewers age 18-34 falling at twice the normal rate in the recent September to January season.
A new Nielsen survey shows that traditional TV usage among millennial viewers tumbled 10.6% between September and January, the New York Post reports. Since 2012, traditional TV usage had only been falling at about 4% a year from season to season.
The sudden acceleration of young people dropping TV in favor of Netflix surprised many analysts. “The change in behavior is stunning. The use of streaming and smartphones just year-on-year is double-digit increases,” Alan Wurtzel, NBCUniversal’s audience research chief, told the Post. “I’ve never seen that kind of change in behavior.”
In 2011, 21.7 million young adults were tuning in to their TV sets, but that figure fell to 17.8 million last month, a drop of almost 20%. That trend is likely to continue as more millennials turn to online video streaming from Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO GO and other sources.
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