Youths Are Watching, but Less Often on TV

Television is America’s No. 1 pastime, with an average of four hours and 39 minutes consumed by every person every day. But more and more young people are tuning in elsewhere.

Americans ages 12 to 34 are spending less time in front of TV sets, even as those 35 and older are spending more, according to Nielsen, a company that tracks media use. The divide along a demographic line reveals the effect of Internet videos, social networks, mobile phones and video games — in short, all the alternatives to the television set that are taking up growing slices of the American attention span. Young people are still watching the same shows, but they are streaming them on computers and phones to a greater degree than their parents or grandparents do.