Television is dying. Slowly.

The average young person today spends a lot less time watching television than her parents or grandparents. And that time has been declining quickly in recent years, as shown in this chart posted by Rich Greenfield:

In the first quarter of 2015, the average adult under 25 watched 16 percent less television than the same demographic watched a year earlier. For people between 25 and 34, television dropped by 9.2 percent in a year. And that comes after several years of smaller declines in the hours spent watching TV.

So television is dying. But it's important to distinguish between "dying" and dead. Young people watch less TV than they did a few years ago, but they still watch a lot of TV. In 2015, the 93 hours per month of television the average 18- to 25-year-old watched is still more than the 23 hours they spent playing console video games, 31 hours spent browsing the web on a PC, and 52 hours using apps or the web on a smartphone. Watching traditional television is still the most popular way young people — and everyone else — consumes electronic media.

But if these trends continue, that won't be true for long.

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