A while back my brother and I asked in a Survey “How do you watch TV?” The survey came from a discussion my brother and I were having about Hulu, and our curiosity surrounding how many people, and what types of people, watch TV through Hulu. I have become a rather large fan of Hulu watching it through Boxee and through the web interface. (I have installed both an Apple TV and the Ubuntu Linux OS’s on several machines, making this easier–perhaps more for another post). As we continued the discussion, I suggested we use the Google Forms feature to toss together a quick survey, asking those we follow, and those that follow us, to take part. (We sought input from “friends” on Facebook, Twitter, and our blogs.) We acknowledge up front that this is a sampling of people we know, and thus may have selection biased introduced simply as a function of our relationships with others.
My good friend and Colleague Dr Swartz has since asked the age old question–”What were the results!?”
Well, I am here to tell you (and I will be assisted by the rather cool graphics generated by Google as part of their Google Forms functionality.)
As of this date, we have had 100 responses. When asked if they watched Hulu 65% said yes, while 35% have not.
When asked the “demographic” questions, we learned picked up some other interesting “tid bits.”
For instance when asked , “Are you a student” we learned that:
And that the respondents came from all the areas where we “advertised” the survey:
But here is where it gets interesting. When we started looking at correlation between questions, it became apparent that the majority of Hulu watchers are students (both grad and undergrad) but what was really interesting is that nearly 100% of the “non-students” who went to the survey from Facebook did NOT watch Hulu (and from the comments it appears most had not heard of Hulu.) I suspect (but can’t prove, since we didn’t ask many more questions) that those people who are out of college, and away from convenient access to high speed internet, are less likely to know about, and use, these sorts of tools. In addition, and this is important, I suspect that it is NOT a function of simply “age” since grad students do watch Hulu when they have time, but is rather a function of ready access. Remember, these are people we “know” and thus the non-students are most likely our peers, people our age who are no longer tied to the University networks.
I suspect that it is NOT a function of simply “age”
I am curious if we were to ask people of all ages, and all walks of life, if we would see an “age” split or if the suspicion that it is related to access would hold. It is this sort of “digging” just below the surface that I really found interesting. It might even be worth further study as we continue to have discussions about who uses technology.
Anyway, here’s the results–let me know what YOU think of the outcomes. And if you decide to conduct any surveys let us know, we will gladly help get the work out!
