Home Entertainment Becomes Family Focal Point

LONDON, February 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- British families are more likely to watch TV together than eat together, as the telly has become the hub of all family life, according to a new survey.

Only 5 hours a week are spent eating with family members, whereas the average Brit will spend more than double that watching TV with their families.

Watching the same shows together gave them 'something to talk about' and brought them closer together as it was a 'shared experience' and more than half said their TV was the centre of the family household.

Modern families are also more likely to stick obsessively to watching the same shows spending hours ploughing through episode after episode on box set than ever before.

Warner Home Video (http://www.warnertv.com/) commissioned the survey in to the viewing habits of 3000 families to launch their new Warner Home Video and HBO DVD promotion offering Season 1 box sets for GBP7.

Ian Fullerton, Marketing Director of HBO Entertainment, said: "Watching TV box sets has well and truly become a popular past time in the UK over the past 5 years, even with the emergence of video on demand and downloads.

"Families have said they would stay up past their bedtimes to watch more of a box set together, turning down nights out in favour of staying in and watching their favourite shows."

Nearly half of families admitted ploughing through box sets together with nearly half saying they have marathon sessions where they watch episodes back to back, hooked on storylines.

The most popular series were Friends, Entourage, True Blood and the Sopranos as families agreed they preferred watching their favourite shows with other members of their family. Families were most likely to spend hours in front of the TV at weekends with a third admitting they have watched a whole series over a weekend together.

One in four parents even admitted sending the kids off to bed early to ensure they got in a couple more episodes of their favourite shows.

More than a third said they had felt they had become obsessed with certain TV shows and that one in five said they started to think of the characters like they were their friends.

Ian Fullerton from HBO (http://store.hbo.com/) said: "It's encouraging to see that it is becoming such a shared family experience and incredible how people are becoming so immersed that they treat the characters as part of their daily lives and even begin mimicking them!

"In these belt-tightening times there has never been a cheaper way to start a new series box set addiction with our fantastic offer."

Men were more likely to worry about their partners getting too obsessed with a show and the characters with 29 per cent reporting that their partners had started acting like characters they had watched on the TV.

Nearly half said they or their family had picked up accents and phrases from watching too many episodes of the same shows with most blaming Friends and The Big Bang Theory for this.

Seven out of ten said they had felt sad when they came to an end of a series and that they missed the characters.

For further information, case studies and additional quotes, contact Alison Jackson: alison.jackson@swns.com - +44(0)7917-780563