TV audiences aren't where they used to be

Only 632,000 viewers watched the season two finale of HBO's "Girls" at its regularly scheduled time, which is a sharp decline from the million or so who watched the last show of the first season. But the actual number of viewers is closer to 4.6 million, once you add the two encore airings that ran on the same night, plus DVR, plus HBO Go, plus HBO On Demand. This is why it's become so hard to tally viewership - you really don't know where they're all coming from. And it's especially difficult with a show like "Girls," where the under-30 audience is so large. Nielsen still says that the average American spends more than 41 hours each week in front of a screen, and most of the time it's a television. If it only were that clear cut. From Deadline:

Turns out there are more than 5M so-called "zero TV" homes now, up from from more than 2M in 2007. Nielsen's term for the group is a little deceptive: 75% have at least one TV set. But 37% watch video content on computers, 8% on smartphones, and 6% on tablets. A little less than half (48%) watch TV content through subscription services, which Nielsen doesn't identify but I'd assume includes a lot of Netflix customers. As you might imagine, people in these "zero TV" homes tend to be a lot younger than others in traditional TV households, and 41.2% live alone (vs. 26.2% of people in TV households).