Solutions Research Group

by Rob Faulkner
The Hamilton Spectator
Dec 03, 2003

Fade to black on that image of the pie-eyed teenager glued to the television set, turning the living room into a hothouse for young couch potatoes.

According to Statistics Canada reports, last year's teens watched less TV -- about four hours less per week -- than they did a decade ago and kids under 12 years of age watched 4.4 hours less than in 1992.

They haven't tuned out.

But teens (at 13.1 hours per week) and kids (14.2 hours) in 2001 were well below the average Canadian viewer who watched the tube for about 21 hours a week.

"As an analyst from StatsCan I can't make the (connection) but there are other people saying, 'Yes, kids and teens are spending less time watching TV because there are more households with computers and there's a shift,'" said Lotfi Chahdi, sticking close to the data in his new report on 2001 TV habits.

The "other people" include pollsters and youth marketers who, even if Statistics Canada lacks data, suspect teens are sliding from TV screens to computer screens.

That's what happens when you pair TV's loss with the steady rise of home Internet access.

"It's just different screens competing for the same available time: computer screens, TV screens and tiny cellphone screens," said Kaan Yigit, partner at Solutions Research Group Consultants Inc., which studies Canadian youth media habits.

Since the mid-'90s, youth marketers have been probing the new media habits of wired teens at events like the Understanding Youth conference held in Toronto each spring.

And they've noted some changes.

"In the past five to seven years this has become an issue of debate and there's a sense that you're in the business of share of mind, not share of television time," said Yigit, a panelist there for The Medium is the Message: Developing Advertising as Seamless Content, about media fragmentation.

"Go into a 14-year-old's bunker-basement now, and we've actually done this, and you'll see two generations of computers, a high-speed Internet connection, a printer, hand-held games, maybe a Palm Pilot, a CD player," he said. "You've got 10 things competing for your time."

But TV isn't fading for everyone. Statistics Canada's report found the average Canadian watched 21.2 hours per week last year, down slightly from 23 hours in 1992. We also spent more time in this period watching pay TV and specialty channels at the expense of traditional TV networks.

For multi-tasking teens the Web's a TV sidekick that holds plot summaries, character bios and the nifty features of sites like degrassi.tv for Degrassi: The Next Generation, said Pascale LeBlanc, president of research firm Youthopia Communications.

While marketers once saw the Web as a quirk, she says it's now a mass medium where youth gather, and advertisers can learn from their audience by interacting with them. Her staff of 30 young hipsters cite friends, magazines and the Web as their top sources of information.

Citing earlier research, Statistics Canada said 5.8 million of Canada's 12 million households had one person using the Internet, up 23 per cent from 1.1 million in 2000. Internet use was highest in British Columbia and Alberta, where average TV viewing was also the lowest in 2001 (19.4 hours a week).

Gus Schattenberg, author of Ipsos-Reid's The Face of the Web survey in 2000, said while some kids multi-task, their Web habits still require they concentrate on gaming, downloading or chatting.

"It's opened up a world of alternative media that competes directly with television viewing, with live Webcasts, streaming video and the opportunity to download movies and clips" that resemble TV programming, he said.

Some see the future in sites like degrassi.tv which won a Gemini award last month as Canada's "most innovative" Web site. Visitors see schedules, plot guides, cast bios, show histories, behind-the-scenes photos and can become virtual students with a "locker page" containing a Web journal, photo gallery and "Dmail" e-mail service.

Others see the future of youth media habits in TV-Web hybrids like Web TV, streaming Internet video or the wireless Web phones emerging in Europe and Japan.

"It's only to us that there's a division between television and the Internet," Yigit said. "For a two-year-old now who becomes a 15-year-old down the road, there will likely only be one plasma screen."

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