More US consumers have turned to the great American pastime of watching television as the recession strained household budgets, a survey set to be released yesterday shows. More than a third of Americans ranked watching TV, either live or using an On Demand feature or digital video recorder, as their favourite media activity, a 26 per cent jump over 2008, the survey of US entertainment preferences says.

Nearly three-quarters of the respondents, aged 14 to 75, said hard times had cut into purchases of tickets to movies, concerts and sporting events as well as DVDs and video games.

Average TV watching per week surged to nearly 18 hours from less than 16 hours last year, with Internet-savvy millenials - the generation born between 1980 and 1995 - charting the largest increase, Deloitte's 2009 State of the Media Democracy survey says.