USA - different visual media

Cisco Visual Networking Index Survey Finds U.S. Consumers Watch More TV, Mobile Video Than Germans, Swedes or Urban Chinese
see also Visual Networking Index (VNI) Pulse Survey

Cisco today announced the first phase of results from a new Visual Networking Index (VNI) Pulse Survey designed to assess worldwide consumer video behaviors and attitudes. The study, conducted by the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and sponsored by Cisco, highlights consumer video consumption and attitudes about video in the United States, urban China, Germany, and Sweden. Survey respondents answered questions regarding their level of access to media technology, the devices they used for viewing video, the amount of time they spent watching video on different devices, and the reasons they watch video content.

Cisco® VNI Pulse activities provide qualitative views of network-based consumer video-usage patterns and trends through direct data collection (see Cisco VNI Pulse political survey). This research complements the latest Cisco VNI Forecast, which provides quantitative data and projections for global Internet Protocol (IP) networking growth and video usage based on Cisco's analysis and independent analysts' forecasts.

For this initial phase of the study, more than 1,000 consumers from each of the four target countries completed online or telephone questionnaires about their video usage during the month of November 2008.

Key findings

U.S. consumers watch the most TV: an average of 3.8 hours per day. Germans watched 2.9 hours on average; Swedes, 2.1 hours; and urban Chinese, 1.8 hours.

Urban China has the largest percent of users who watch online video via their PCs, at 97 percent, with the U.S. following at 81 percent.

The U.S. has the largest percentage of users watching video on a mobile phone, at 23 percent.

U.S. respondents who watch video on their mobile phone spend an average of 36 minutes per day doing so.

Eighty-five percent of the German respondents are interested in viewing Internet video on their TV sets, compared with 55 percent of Swedes, 54 percent of Americans, and 35 percent of urban Chinese.

U.S. respondents watch 2.5 times as much professional video content (TV programs and movies) as they do user-generated video content on their PC or laptop. German respondents watch twice as much user-generated video on their PC or laptop as they do professional video content.

On average, American respondents who use a PC or laptop to view video spend 1.5 hours per day doing so. They are well ahead of the Swedes (who spend 0.7 hours per day), equal to the Germans (1.5 hours per day) and slightly below the Chinese (1.9 hours per day).