REPORT: THE INTERNET POSES NO CHALLENGE TO TV — YET

The notion that the Internet is drawing viewers away from traditional TV is more myth than reality, the president of TVB, the broadcast industry marketing trade group, suggested on Tuesday. Speaking at the SNL Kagan TV and Radio Finance Summit in New York, Steve Lanzano unveiled his group’s latest study indicating that Internet video amounts to only 1.5 percent of total viewing while mobile video accounts for just .4 percent of the total. And while the DVR is becoming a standard gadget in most homes, Live TV accounts for 90.7 percent of video viewing, while watching via the DVR represents 7.4 percent. And despite all the competition from cable TV, videogames, and the Internet, the average household watched 59 hours, 28 minutes of broadcast TV per week during the 2010-2011 season, setting a new record. Lanzano drew particular attention to the competition — or lack of it — from Facebook, noting that while the average person spends about 13 minutes a day on Facebook, they spend 297 minutes watching TV. “No wonder our friends at [General Motors] are making some changes,” he said. [Last month GM announced that it will stop placing ads on Facebook, after determining that they had little impact.]