According to this article 20% of viewers watch some portion of TV content online. That’s pretty amazing! Another thing in this article that was unexpected to me is that these users trend towards female. The convergence of the PC and the TV continues and the pace seems to be faster than expected. What I’d like to know is where in the house this viewing is taking place. Are people in their home offices watching streaming videos or are they, like my household, watching content via a PC connected to a large flat panel monitor that is being used as a TV? This is easily enabled by using an LCD flat panel TV as a monitor and because LCD TVs are very monitor like. Consequently, this mode of application seems natural — at least to me. As for time shifting … I never thought about this, but if the shows are available to watch online at anytime, then it isn’t necessary to record the shows live to watch later (I imagine this didn’t occur to me mainly because I don’t watch much broadcast TV any more). This presents a special problem for advertisers and fans. For advertisers, there is no standard way, currently, to track viewership outside of live TV.   I don’t know why, though, since it’s easy enough to track hits, time on a webpage, and inbound and outbound navigation via basic web analytics tools — weird. I would think that tracking viewership would be easier and that advertisers would get better data from online viewing than from traditional surveys service providers like Nielsen which only measures the viewing habits of small sample of viewers.   Well, regardless, apparently, they aren’t getting the information or they aren’t taking the data into consideration. On the flip side, because it isn’t being measured, online viewership is not being taken into account for ratings, and consequently popular shows may get canceled due to low live TV viewership. So … does this leave the networks tracking the piece of the audience that may be older and less affluent than the coveted core demographics and the broader population? Leaving out online viewership data seems to be doing a disservice to everyone involved in the system — viewers, broadcasters, and advertisers alike.  Anyhow, here’s a link to the article.