Brits spend 7hrs a day on TV, Internet, mobile phones

London, Aug 19 (ANI): The Office of Communications in Britain has revealed that Britons spend seven hours a day watching TV, surfing the net and using their mobile phones.

From data collected, the average person actually squeezes in the equivalent of nearly nine hours of media and communications by multi-tasking on several devices.

The statistics, which come from industry sources and a survey of 1,138 adults, showed that television still dominates people's media habits, with the average person spending around 3.8 hours watching television every day.

"For the first time we have mapped the totality of communications use over one day," the BBC quoted Peter Philips of Ofcom as saying.

The annual Communications Market Report says that the average person spends around 15 hours 45 minutes every day awake.

Of this time, it says, the average person spends seven hours and five minutes "engaging in media and communications activities".

The report found that adults aged between 16 and 24 appeared to consume the least, spending just six hours and 35 minutes a day on the phone, laptop, radio or television.ut by multitasking - effectively using two or more devices at once - the survey found that young adults were able to squeeze the equivalent of nine hours 32 minutes worth of consumption into that time.

"They are taking up more and more communications activities but fitting them into the same amount of time," James Thickett, director of market research and market intelligence at Ofcom, said.

He said this was largely due to the rise in the mobile Internet and the use of smartphones.

The report says that the number of people using their phone to surf the web currently stands at 13.5m people. This has almost tripled since 2008, when the figure stood at 5.7m.

Concurrently, the use of mobile data has exploded, the report said, increasing by 240 percent between 2007 and 2009.

Where broadband was concerned, the report suggested that Internet take-up has now reached 73 percent in the UK, the majority of which is fixed broadband.

But despite the rise in new ways of accessing content, the report says that traditional media, such as TV and radio still dominate people's media habits.

"TV still plays a central role in people's lives. We are watching more than at any time in the last five years," Thickett said. (ANI)