Video Games Consume 4.2% of TV Use in the US Daily

Earlier today I reported that 10% of all Internet usage is for gaming. Well I also found some recent numbers from Nielsen that state roughly 4.2% of all TV usage time, is for video gaming. At 13 minutes average per day, it is the least of the four categories being tracked (Live TV, DVR playback, DVD playback) but is almost matching the 15 minutes per day average for DVDs.

Broken down by demographics, African Americans played the most at 16 minutes per day average while Asians played the least, only 9 minutes per day average.

At 13 minutes per day that adds up to 395 minutes average per month or 6 hours 35 minutes. That’s roughly 0.9% of the month. If you put in 8 hours of sleep per day, it comes out to 1.35% of the monthly awake time for American 18-49 with a TV in their home.

The numbers date back from November 2010. Here’s the full break down they did.

That’s not too terrible considering far more households have televisions than have  game consoles attached to them. According to VGChartz, there are 31 million Xbox 360s, 19.3M Playstation 3’s and 41M Wii in the America. Nielsen reports that at least 115.9M US households have at least one TV in them, so some 74M homes maximum without a console and accounting for only one console per household, 24.8M minimum.

Of course, consoles overlap as much as people have more than one TV. I know lots of homes with multiple consoles so the number is probably somewhere in the middle.