Media

Live TV not lighting up viewers like it used to

Water-cooler TV is disappearing — just as the all-important fall TV season is about to kick off.

While TV execs are ready to unleash multimillion-dollar ad campaigns to lure viewers to watch their new fall shows at the appointed time, the latest research shows that audiences are slowly tuning out live television.

In New York, for instance, viewers this year are watching about 15 minutes less of live TV a day while increasing the amount of TV they watch delayed or via streaming services, according to Nielsen’s latest “Local Watch” survey.

New Yorkers still had the TV set on for a stunning average of four and a half hours a day, but that was down from four hours and forty-five minutes logged in Nielsen’s first report in February 2013.

New Yorkers spent 33 minutes on “time-shifted” TV viewing such as DVR playback and seven minutes on over-the-top streaming via the Internet. Nielsen will only begin to count mobile viewing on tablets and smartphones later this fall.

New Yorkers aren’t the only ones too busy to adhere to the networks’ schedules.

Of the top 25 markets, 16 cities saw a decline in live viewing compared with Nielsen’s 2013 study.

“You have to ask are we starting to reach a tipping point where viewers have so much opportunity they’re not watching live TV anymore?” said Brad Adgate, Horizon Media’s senior vice president of research. “It’s particularly young people, but it’s pushing out to the older demographics.”

San Francisco recorded the lowest live viewership — just three hours and 27 minutes.

Folks from Rust Belt market Pittsburgh watched the most live TV on the big screen, sitting through five hours 19 minutes of TV per day. Viewers in St Louis, watched the most minutes of time-shifted TV while viewers in Sacramento were the biggest watchers of TV on the Internet.

The news is sure to put additional resources behind sports and big-ticket programming such as NFL games and awards shows.

“Why are marketers charged a premium for advertising in prime time when everyone’s seeing those ad spots on a Saturday afternoon?” one ad agency boss told The Post.