Generations Disagree on What Qualifies as Watching TV

A hundred years after the first public demonstration of the wonder that was television, “watching TV” has gotten… complicated. For many older Americans, it still means the classic setup: a big screen, a couch and content that follows a fixed timetable. For younger generations, however, video is video, no matter if it’s a prestige drama or a 30-second reel on Instagram that you didn’t even mean to watch (and yet somehow watched 12 of).

That generational split in how video content is perceived shows up clearly in the data: According to a Deloitte survey of more than 3,500 consumers in the U.S., around half of Gen Z and Millennial respondents consider watching social media videos the same as watching TV. Among Baby Boomers and Matures, only 22 and 10 percent of respondents think that the two are essentially the same thing. And it’s not just “linear” TV that suffers from young people’s fondness of clips and reels: Deloitte found that almost 6 in 10 Gen Z respondents said they spend more time watching videos on social media than they do on streaming services.

So as the lines between TV, streaming and social media get increasingly blurry, it gets increasingly difficult to measure how much “TV” we’re all watching, because we’re not even talking about the same thing anymore. And while older consumers are still getting used to streaming services, the youngest have already moved on to the next thing.