American households average nearly 8 hours of TV watched per day, according to Nielsen, a market-research firm—and that’s not counting time spent streaming on computers or mobile devices. The Nielsen data count any time when at least one person is watching TV in the household. So in Nielsen’s methodology, if three people watch a program for two hours, that still counts as only two hours, not six. Clearly, Americans love their shows.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in the years 2013–2017, Americans spent about 55 percent of their leisure time watching TV. Unlike Nielsen, the BLS included in its figures any video consumption, whether cable TV proper or movies and videos on computers, phones, and tablets.
