The Video Advertising Bureau today circulated an updated edition of its leisure time infographic, reporting that the average American aged 15 and over spends 2 hours and 37 minutes a day watching video, or 51% of a total daily leisure budget of 5 hours and 10 minutes. The trade body says it is the fourth consecutive year in which video has taken more than half of that budget.

The document, titled "The Time of Our Lives," was distributed by email at 18:30 on September 2, 2026 from VAB's New York office at 220 East 42nd Street. It carries no separate publication date on the artwork. According to the source line printed at the foot of the graphic, the figures come from a VAB analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2025 American Time Use Survey, restricted to persons aged 15 and over and conducted in the field by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The infographic ranks ten leisure categories by minutes per day. Watching video sits first at 2:37. Socializing and communicating follows at 35 minutes, or 11% of the total. Playing games takes 24 minutes and 8%. Sports, exercise and recreation accounts for 22 minutes and 7%. Relaxing takes 21 minutes, also 7%. Reading for personal interest gets 16 minutes and 5%. Computer use for leisure, a category distinct from watching video, is credited with 13 minutes and 4%. Travel related to leisure and sports takes 11 minutes and 4%. A residual "Other" bucket takes 11 minutes and 2%. Arts and entertainment closes the list at 4 minutes and 1%.

The ranking is the entire disclosure. There is no year-over-year table, no demographic split, no weekday and weekend comparison, and no sample size. The four-year claim about video's majority share appears only in the covering email, not in the graphic, and none of the attached materials contain the prior-year figures that would allow a reader to check it.

The arithmetic does not close

The ten published components add up to 314 minutes. The stated total is 310 minutes, printed as 5 hours and 10 minutes. The four-minute gap is consistent with independent rounding of each category to the nearest minute, which is the ordinary explanation, but the infographic does not say so.

A second inconsistency is harder to attribute to rounding. Travel related to leisure and sports and the "Other" bucket both carry 11 minutes. Travel is labelled 4%. Other is labelled 2%. Against a 310-minute denominator, 11 minutes is 3.5%, which rounds to 4% in both cases. Against 314 minutes it is 3.5% as well. The percentages as printed sum to exactly 100, which suggests the 2% figure was adjusted downward so the column would balance rather than derived from the underlying minutes. Anyone lifting the percentage column into a deck will carry that adjustment forward without seeing it.

The distinction matters less for the headline than for the tail. Video's 51% survives either denominator: 157 minutes is 50.6% of 310 and 50.0% of 314. The small categories are where a rounding convention decides whether a channel looks like 2% of the day or nearly double that.

What the primary activity rule removes

The footnote is explicit about a methodological constraint that governs everything above it. The survey is based on respondents' "main activity only." The example given in the document is a person watching television while socializing with friends, in which case the time is assigned to whichever the respondent considers the primary activity.

This is a single-attribution model applied to a population that does not consume media serially. Time spent scrolling a phone during a streaming episode is credited once, to whichever activity the diary respondent named. So is a podcast played during exercise, or a game running on a second device during a football broadcast. The consequence is that ATUS categories are mutually exclusive by construction, and the sum of media exposure across categories is therefore lower than any measurement system that counts concurrent sessions.

That construction is why the ATUS numbers are so much smaller than the ones circulating in media planning decks. EMARKETER data cited in an InMarket report earlier this year put average daily time with digital media at 9 hours and 4 minutes, with mobile alone taking 4 hours and 23 minutes. Both figures cannot describe the same day unless the underlying rules differ, and they do. ATUS asks people to name one activity per interval. Device-based estimates count each screen separately and allow them to overlap.

A six-week hole in the 2025 record

The infographic carries a second note that most infographics would have omitted. Because of the 2025 United States federal government shutdown, all American Time Use Survey operations were suspended, and no ATUS data was collected between September 30, 2025 and November 11, 2025. Collection resumed on November 13.

That is a gap of 42 days, roughly six weeks, or about 12% of the calendar year. It is not a random six weeks. The interval covers the opening stretch of the American autumn broadcast season and the early weeks of the professional football calendar, a period in which video consumption is seasonally elevated. The infographic does not state whether the annual averages were reweighted to compensate for the missing diary days, nor what effect the gap had on the standard errors around each category.

VAB disclosed the gap. That is more than most vendor infographics do with an inherited data limitation, and the disclosure is what makes the caveat usable. It also means the 2025 figures are not strictly comparable with the 2024 edition on which the four-year streak claim partly rests.

Two hours and 37 minutes, twice

There is a coincidence in the numbers worth flagging, because it is the kind that gets misread in a slide.

The VAB infographic puts watching video, as a primary leisure activity across all screens, at 2 hours and 37 minutes a day for persons aged 15 and over. In June 2026, VAB's own multiplatform video consumption report cited an EMARKETER forecast placing connected television viewing at 2 hours and 37 minutes a day for adults aged 18 and over in 2026, up 8% from 2 hours and 25 minutes in 2025.

The two figures are identical and describe different things. One is total video as a self-reported primary activity, spanning broadcast, cable, streaming, short-form and anything else the respondent classified as watching video. The other is digital video on a single device class, excluding linear viewing entirely, and sits alongside a further 1 hour and 39 minutes on mobile and 21 minutes on desktop in the same forecast. Placed side by side without their definitions, they would imply that connected television has absorbed the whole of American video time, which neither source claims.

What sits below the video line

The nine categories underneath video are the more interesting part of the document for anyone building a channel mix, because each of them corresponds to an advertising market of very different maturity.

Playing games at 24 minutes a day now outranks sports and exercise, relaxing and reading. That figure lands in a year when the interactive advertising market has been formalising quickly. Electronic Arts opened its console, mobile and PC portfolio to brands through EA Advertising in June 2026, citing more than 120 million monthly players and more than a billion EA SPORTS FC matches a month. Kantar research commissioned by AppLovin and published in February 2026 found that 71% of mobile gamers who buy after seeing a game advertisement do so the same day. The 24-minute figure is a ceiling on primary-activity gaming time, not on reachable gaming impressions, since ATUS would assign a mobile game played during a television programme to whichever the respondent named first.

Socializing and communicating at 35 minutes is the second largest bucket and the one least legible to advertising measurement, because ATUS treats it as an activity rather than a platform. In-person conversation, telephone calls and social media use can all fall inside it depending on how the respondent described the interval.

Computer use for leisure at 13 minutes is the category most at odds with platform-side data. A Northeastern University study of desktop browsing published in May 2026 and covered by PPC Land found Alphabet properties taking 35% of desktop time, with social media at 25.3% and email at 24.9% of the total. The ATUS figure is small because most of what people do on a computer during the working day is classified as work, not leisure, and because video watched on a laptop is credited to watching video rather than to computer use.

Reading for personal interest holds 16 minutes. Arts and entertainment, which in ATUS terms covers attendance at live events, museums and cinemas, takes 4 minutes, the smallest published line.

Where this sits in VAB's 2026 output

The infographic is the latest in a dense run of research from the trade body, which represents premium multiscreen television providers and distributors. VAB published a 94% long-form ad completion figure sourced from 2023 FreeWheel research on August 28, closing its summer email series. Earlier in August it reported that 52% of consumers who follow digital creators are more likely to search for brands advertised in programming featuring those creators. In July it added three vendors to its advanced measurement directory, taking the roster to 20. In June it updated its addressable television guide with 2026 data, and its multiplatform consumption report recorded connected television viewing up 8% with smart televisions in 82% of United States homes.

The organisation's commercial position is not neutral on the question the infographic answers. In February 2026 VAB and TVision published The Impression Gap, finding premium video platforms ahead of YouTube on every attention and engagement metric measured. In March it accused Nielsen of suppressing a February edition of The Gauge that would have shown linear television at 47.4% of viewing time against streaming's 41.9%. A finding that video takes more than half of American leisure time supports the case for video budgets generally, which is the category VAB's members sell.

The infographic makes no such argument in its own text. It publishes a ranking and a source note, and leaves the inference to the reader.

Why the number is useful and where it stops

Time-spent data of this kind does not function as trading currency. No advertisement is bought against an ATUS diary entry. What the figures do is set the outer boundary of the attention pool that every currency subdivides, and that boundary is what a media planner needs when a channel forecast starts to imply more hours in the day than exist.

The contrast with currency data is instructive. Nielsen's Gauge put streaming at 48.6% of American television watch-time in May 2026, with cable at 20.4% and broadcast at 19.2%. Its Ad Supported Gauge reported advertising-funded platforms at 71.5% of all United States television viewing in the second quarter of 2026, down 1.3 points on the first quarter. Those are shares of television time. The VAB figure is a share of leisure time, of which television time is a subset. A deck that moves between the two without saying which denominator applies will produce percentages that cannot be added.

The same caution applies to the fast-growing corners of the market. FAST channels, ad-supported video on demand and subscription tiers with advertising all divide the 157 minutes rather than adding to them. So does YouTube, which Nielsen placed at 13.8% of United States television watch-time in May. Growth in any one of them is a transfer, not an expansion, unless total video time itself is rising, and the VAB infographic gives no year-over-year figure with which to test that.

There is a further limit that the primary-activity rule makes unavoidable. TVision reported in August 2026 that of roughly 200 daily minutes with video programming, 24 are advertisement opportunities and viewers are attentive for nine of them. Set against VAB's 157 minutes of primary-activity video, the two datasets are measuring different populations under different definitions, but they point at the same structural fact: the reachable, attended fraction of the video day is far smaller than the headline. That fraction, not the headline, is what a frequency capping decision actually spends.

What the source material does not disclose

Four omissions are worth recording. The infographic states no sample size for the 2025 ATUS wave, though the survey ordinarily interviews in the region of 2,000 households a month. It gives no confidence intervals, which matters most for the four-minute arts and entertainment line. It provides no prior-year comparison, which leaves the fourth-consecutive-year claim resting on documents not attached. And it does not identify which specific BLS tables the analysis draws on, so the VAB reconstruction cannot be reproduced from the published figures alone.

None of that makes the ranking wrong. It does mean the document functions as a directional reference rather than as evidence, and it is presented that way: a one-page graphic, a source line, and two candid notes about method.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Video Advertising Bureau, a trade organisation representing premium multiscreen television providers and distributors, headquartered at 220 East 42nd Street, New York. The underlying data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey, fielded by the U.S. Census Bureau.

What: An updated one-page infographic titled "The Time of Our Lives," ranking ten leisure activities by daily minutes for Americans aged 15 and over. Watching video leads at 2 hours 37 minutes, or 51% of a stated 5 hour 10 minute daily leisure total, followed by socializing and communicating at 35 minutes, playing games at 24, sports and exercise at 22, relaxing at 21, reading at 16, computer use for leisure at 13, leisure travel at 11, a residual category at 11 and arts and entertainment at 4.

When: Distributed by email at 18:30 on September 2, 2026. The data reflects the 2025 American Time Use Survey wave, whose collection was suspended between September 30 and November 11, 2025 during the federal government shutdown and resumed on November 13.

Where: United States, persons aged 15 and over, measured as a national average across all screens and locations.

Why: The figures set an outer boundary on the attention pool that television and digital currencies subdivide. For buyers, the practical value lies in the denominator: streaming, FAST, connected television and gaming growth divide the same 157 daily video minutes rather than adding to them, and the single-activity attribution rule means the published totals sit well below device-based estimates of media exposure.