People in Birmingham watch a lot of TV.
According to Nielsen’s first quarter local market report, people in Birmingham watch an average of 7 hours and 30 minutes worth of TV per day, most of any of the 70 markets where Nielsen has electronic measurement of TV viewing.
Portland and Washington, D.C., were the markets that had the highest penetration of subscription video-on-demand services at 60%.
Overall, time spent watching TV is higher in set-meter markets than in Nielsen’s people meter markets, which are the largest cities.
In Birmingham, people spend 6 hour and 27 minutes watching live TV, 52 minutes on time-shifted TV and 11 minutes using a multimedia device.
The set-meter markets with the highest viewing after Birmingham are Memphis, Knoxville, Louisville and Norfolk. The set-meter markets with the lowest viewing levels are Salt Lake City, San Diego, Austin, San Antonio and Albuquerque.
Among Nielsen’s markets with local people meters, people spent the most time watching TV in Cleveland, where they spent 4:44 per day watching live, 0:57 watching time-shifted TV and 11 minutes using a multimedia device.
In terms of TV watching in local people meter markets, Cleveland was followed by Pittsburgh, Detroit, Baltimore and Atlanta.
The local people meter market where people spent the least time watching TV was San Francisco, where there was 2:42 of live watching, 37 minutes of time-shifted TV and 14 minutes of multimedia device usage.
Also on the low end of TV viewing time were Los Angeles, Seattle, Miami and Denver. Of the 24 local people meter markets, SVOD penetration was about 50% in 18. The lowest penetration was in Cleveland and Pittsburgh at 43%. Nielsen said SVOD penetration is up nine percentage points since last February.
The best people meter market for Netflix is Portland, with 54% penetration. For Amazon Prime, the top market was Washington, D.C. at 35%. Hulu did best in Atlanta with 14%.
The top set-top markets for SVOD were Norfolk, San Diego and Hartford, all above 60%. The bottom market was Memphis at 39%.
“As more and more devices continue to gain acceptance in homes, household viewing habits are evolving and expanding, offering more media touchpoints than ever before,” Nielsen said in the report. “Nearly a quarter of U.S. households now have access to Smart TVs, with urban cities such as Washington, D.C., Seattle and New York leading the way. Currently, Netflix is found in 45% of Local People Meter (LPM) TV homes and 58% of TV households in LPM markets now own a tablet.”
