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May 26, 2012

How much TV do you watch each day?

by Bob Sassone, posted Dec 15th 2006 12:32PM

tvI always have to chuckle a little bit when I see articles like this (and we see a couple of them every single year) that tell us how many hours a day we watch television. Because while the "average American" watches 4 1/2 hours of a television a day (or 1555 hours a year), I must spend at least double that, around 10 hours a day.

The other statistics don't really surprise me though. The Census Bureau says we spend around 10 hours total a day watching TV, listening to the radio, listening to music, surfing the web, and reading magazines and newspapers. Now, I think all of those things are just a part of everyone's day and there's really nothing surprising about it. That's a lot of territory, and the rest of the time of course has to be done eating, commuting, working, talking on the phone, and sleeping.

How many hours a day do you spend watching television?

[via TV Newser]

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Sgt.Princess

yeah, about a half hour tops. i'm usually over at joystiq; thought i'd swing by and see what was happenin'. more than 3 hours a day? i'm grossed out. i don't even game more than a half hour a day. i encourage you guys to learn an instrument or an outdoorsish job. go build something or volunteer. or watch tv, you know- either way works.

December 16 2006 at 3:50 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jaymez

Monday through Friday, maybe 5 hours, most of that is on Fridays. I'm out the door for 0630, I get home long enough to turn on the TV at 2300 most nights. By the time I grab my shower and get ready for bed it's 2330, time for a Family Guy rerun and sleep.

It's on all weekend, but, most of that time it's ignored. Grey's and Housewives are the only shows I follow regularly.

December 15 2006 at 8:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Sean

Well, this is incredibly difficult to say since, right now for example, most of the shows I watch are in reruns, which I often don't watch. So now I'm probably getting in three hours per day. When new episodes start being aired, however, that can easily jump up to four, five, or even six if there are some good movies on TV that week.

December 15 2006 at 7:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Gig

2 to 3 hours. But, thanks to Tivo I get to watch 4 hours worth of TV in that time.

December 15 2006 at 3:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jonathan

I don't know if it's sad or not but i'm in front of a 'screen' pretty much all the time every day

I work in front of my computer for 7 hours at work, then i come home and get on the internet, then i watch tv and then i play videogames. All on 'screens'

Then on weekends i watch TV and movies with the girlfriend and go see movies on another type of screen..

Wow the only time i'm not staring into a screen is when i'm sleepin.. heh

December 15 2006 at 3:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Brody

Probably about 3-4 hrs.

December 15 2006 at 3:04 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Darren

I'm definitely in the 4-5 hours per day and twice as much on the weekend. What else is there to do?

December 15 2006 at 2:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jordan Running

I watch 2.5-3 hours a day. But all of that is time-shifted and commercial-free, so it's really 4-4.5 "TV hours."

Just think, if the average American watches 4.5 hours of TV each day, those without commercial-skipping capabilities are sitting through more than 500 hours of commercials--more than 3 solid weeks, or 6.25 percent of their lives!

December 15 2006 at 1:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tucker

Well, what counts as actual TV watching? If having a TV on counts, then probably 95% of my waking hours - it's a newsroom type situation here at work, so we've got CNN on all day. There's 8 hours right there, and I haven't even gotten home yet.

In terms of actual, sit-on-the-couch, dedicated TV watching, it's hard to estimate because it fluctuates day to day, season to season. Right now I spend a lot of time doing other stuff because nothing is on. Plus, does catching up on other shows via downloaded (shh) or DVD episodes count as TV watching? If that's the case, cramming two seasons of 24 into the last couple weeks definitely ups my quota for December.

December 15 2006 at 1:29 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Borat

4 hours a day seems right for me. But that includes 2 hours of late night (Letterman/Conan/Ferguson).

December 15 2006 at 1:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply

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