Today is National Grandparents Day, and that means you should probably go out and visit some of the oldest and wisest people in your life. When you visit your grandparents, you might even watch some TV with them, and when you do, it'll probably be on a good-old-fashioned TV set at the exact time the program is on.
That's not just an assumption; that's how most older people watch TV, as opposed to youngsters who like to stream it on the Internet. And now we know there's an ever-widening divide in the TV viewing habits of the old and the young.
Traditional TV has become a medium that the old enjoy, whereas the young are more and more turning to the Internet for their entertainment, according to new research by media analyst Michael Nathanson of Moffett Nathanson Research. The median age of a broadcast or cable TV viewer was 44.4 years old during the 2013-2014 TV season, which is a 6 percent increase from four years ago. The median age for viewers of the shows on the major broadcast networks was 53.9 years old, which is a 7 percent increase from four years ago. TV viewers are aging even faster than the U.S. population, according to Nathanson.
"The shift in demographic viewing is caused by a combination of factors ranging from lower TV penetration rates of under-25 year old households to increasing use of time-shifting technologies in most under-55 year old households," Nathanson wrote in a research report.
More and more, younger audiences are getting their TV from services that allow on-demand viewing, such as Hulu and Netflix. Nathanson found that all age groups, except for viewers 55 years and older, decreased their viewing of live TV by 13 percent. The oldest age group continues to watch their shows at their regularly scheduled times.
The age demographics of the big four broadcast networks have remained consistent with people's perceptions of them. CBS has the oldest audience with its viewers having a median age of 58.7 years. FOX has the youngest viewers with a median age of 47.8 years.
All of this research doesn't so much give us new information as it does confirm what we already thought we knew about who's watching traditional TV and who's using online streaming services. However, seeing the generational divide continue to widen is an interesting finding. More and more traditional TV outlets are making their content digitally available, which they hope attracts younger audiences. As the highly sought after demographic of the Millennials grows older, maybe streaming will continue to be their thing, but a new technology we don't even know about yet could maybe become the next big thing for tomorrow's younger generation.
