If a new study by Nielsen is accurate, reports of the video star's death at the hands of the Internet have been greatly exaggerated. The ratings company tracked the time that Americans spend with the three main "screens" in their life—TV, Internet, and the mobile phone—and found that TV still rules. The study claims that Americans broke new records in TV watching during the 2007-2008 season: households averaged 8 hours and 18 minutes per day, or an average of 4 hours and 45 minutes per person per day. These figures are the highest on record, and they represent a quarterly increase in addition to a yearly increase.

Both regular and time-shifted TV viewing are on the rise, with time-shifted viewing posting a whopping 52.5 percent year-over-year increase from the third quarter of 2007 to the third quarter of 2008; regular viewing was up only 4.1 percent.

As for the other screens in the Nielsen study, the report pegs mobile phone video viewing at 3 hours and 37 minutes per month, up from 3 hours and 15 minutes the previous month. This statistic includes any type of mobile video viewing, from subscription-based offerings from wireless providers like Sprint to YouTube and other web-based video outlets.

Nielsen claims that Internet use in general was up only 5.7 percent year-over-year, with Americans spending only an hour and a half more per month online than they did in the third quarter of 2007.

Color me skeptical of Nielsen's Internet usage numbers—their panel-based traffic estimates for Ars and other sites for which we have numbers are so low as to literally defy the laws of physics (we'd have to change all of our graphics to uncompressed TIFFs to square Nielsen's estimate of our audience size with our actual bandwidth usage). But Nielsen does know TV, so you might think that the company's estimates for TV audience increases would be great news for the likes of CBS, NBC, and other broadcasters. But you'd be wrong.

Unfortunately for the broadcast networks, the action is in cable TV, and it has been for over a decade now. Nielsen's numbers show that network TV viewing has been bleeding viewers since at least 1984, but audience loss isn't even their biggest problem. Ad spending for network TV was down last quarter, and a recent Variety article suggests that the possible bankruptcies of US automakers could be a final nail in the medium's coffin.

This situation led to an unintentionally amusing audience question at a New York conference last week on the future of television. An audience member was confused about how viewership could be up but ad revenue could be significantly reduced; top network execs patiently explained that just having eyeballs wasn't much good in a major economic downturn. If advertisers don't have the budget to buy, it doesn't matter if your network reaches two billion people a night. (The lesson could also be applied to any web startup concentrating only on eyeballs, as though users automatically equal revenue.)

American automakers are major network TV advertisers, accounting for almost seven percent of total network ad spending. (Of course, they're also major advertisers in every other medium, including the Internet; Paul Kedrosky has the breakdown.)

The collapse of auto ad spending would push the networks even further into the red; but if the networks really imploded, at least the spectrum watchers would be happy. At the very least, the collapse of broadcast TV as a viable business model would take the wind out of opposition to white spaces broadband, and it might even free up a ton of prime (non-white-space) spectrum for wireless broadband.