Netflix Vs. TV

• Abstract:

  We conducted a study on whether people preferred to watch TV or Netflix more and whether there was a difference in viewing preference based on gender. We did this to see which form of media is more popular among students of North Olmsted High School and if males and females had similar or different preferences.

  Before we gathered all of our data we first did some background information about our topic. While we failed to find any actual studies that were similar to ours we did find many news articles about TV vs Netflix. Most of these articles said that while TV still had a greater audience, Netflix was steadily gaining on them or they discussed why Netflix is better than TV in general.

  After we conducted our background research we created surveys that asked two questions. The first question was what do you prefer to watch TV or Netflix? The second question was what is your gender? 120 surveys were sent out but only 82 of them were returned. The sample had been randomly selected using an excel worksheet and the population of interest was North Olmsted High School students.

  After we had obtained our samples we obtained copies of these students’ schedules in order to send a survey to them in one of their classes. We waited for the returns for about one week before we decided to conduct our test. Once we received our surveys back, the data was recorded into Minitab and a tally was made of all the counts as well as a few graphs of the data. We then conducted a chi-squared hypothesis test in order to see if viewing preference for both TV and Netflix was the same for both males and females.

  All of the assumptions checked out so we were able to run the test successfully. We calculated a X^2 value of 1.057 and a p-value of 0.304. Since the p-value was so high we had to reject the null hypothesis at the 0.05 level of significance. Therefore we came to the conclusion that the amount of people who preferred TV or Netflix was not significantly different for males and females

Background:

     Our background research began by using google to find articles about our topic of interest which is, what do people prefer TV or Netflix and how does it differ between the two genders. Unfortunately there were no studies or articles about how Netflix and TV viewership differed based on gender so we had to use articles that talked about TV fared against Netflix in general.

     Huffington Post wrote an article on March 11, 2015 about this subject called “Netflix Continues to Crush Cable” where it was stated that 40 percent of U.S households that have TV and/or Internet subscribe to a video on demand service like Netflix. The article states that this was an increase from 36 percent in 2013. The number of people who are subscribed to top TV providers has fallen by 1.2 million since 2014 and it is believed that this is due to people streaming more online.

<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/11/netflix-cable-tv_n_6846942.html>

     Variety.com wrote an article about this subject called “Netflix caused 50% of U.S TV viewing Drop in 2015”. The article explained that Netflix alone accounted for half of the three percent drop in TV viewing in 2015. It was also predicted that Netflix's streaming hours as a percentage of TV viewing would rise up to 14 percent by the year 2020.

<http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/netflix-tv-ratings-decline-2015-1201721672/>

     Arstechnica.com wrote an article titled “Neflix is a major reason people don’t watch network TV”. The article stated that people who are subscribed to Netflix generally don’t watch news on TV as much as people who aren’t subscribed to Netflix. Netflix subscribers watched 42 percent less, Fox 35 percent less, ABC 32 percent less, and NBC 27 percent less. One factor in play here is age since CBS has taken the biggest drop and it mostly appeals to the older demographic. The article states that the primary reason for this change in TV viewership is due to the fact that Netflix is much more convenient than TV.

<http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/study-netflix-is-a-major-reason-why-people-dont-watch-network-tv/>

     Business insider wrote an article that explained one of Netflix’s advantages over TV was that Netflix doesn’t have any ads or commercials. The research showed that Netflix users on average would avoid seeing six days worth of ads throughout their lifetime. The article stated that one of the chief benefits of using Netflix over TV was that there were no ads and this had a big enough impact that some TV networks actually cut back on ads in order to lure some customers back.

<http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-subscribers-save-160-hours-of-commercials-compared-to-cable-2016-5>

     An article written by cnn was about how the amount of TV people watched had decreased while the amount of streaming that people did had increased over time. A study  showed that the average adult American watched 4 hours and 51 minutes of TV per day which was a thirteen minute decrease from the previous year. On the other hand internet usage on personal computers had increased by 5 minutes per day and smartphone usage had increased by 17 minutes per day. From these statistics it would seem that online streaming has taken a chunk out of TV viewing. The article also suggested that this trend could increase because 35% percent of American households that have TV and broadband access but do not have any streaming video subscriptions yet. It was also reported that the demographics of the streaming households was skewed towards people who are young to middle aged as well as to families.

<http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/11/media/nielsen-report-netflix-amazon-hulu/>

     After viewing several articles about our topic of interest we concluded that no study similar to ours had been conducted or if it had then it was not made available to the public therefore we will be left to rely on our own study to answer the question guiding this study.

Discussion:

Weaknesses:

1. Some people who took the survey did not answer one of the questions as they were instructed to and instead wrote in their own answers. We were forced to remove these surveys from the overall results because if extra categories had been included for these written in answers we would not have been able to properly conduct a chi-squared since our expected cell counts would not have all been greater than or equal to 5.

2. Another weakness in our study is that we only included two options, TV and Netflix. This is a problem because it is likely that some students had a different viewing preference from the options we offered. If we were to conduct this study again we would include other media options such as hulu.

Extrapolation:

    It would be reasonable to extrapolate these results to all North Olmsted high school students but it would not be appropriate to extrapolate this data to a population larger than that. The reason for this is because at the high school we only sampled people between the ages of 14 and 18 so we can’t make any assumptions about people who are outside of that age group. It would also not be appropriate to extrapolate this to all other high schools since North Olmsted is mostly middle class and high schools of other economic statuses might have different preferences.

Suggestions for further work:

   One possible option for future work would be to sample several random high schools throughout the country to see if our results hold true in other places.