Patricia Nollet, shown watching on her computer at home in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Feb. 25, is part of growing trend of young people watching TV on computers or mobile devices. (Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Royall)

Patricia Nollet, 22, sits in a subway car on the way to her job at a marketing company in Washington, D.C. People around her talk, read the paper or listen to music, but Nollet does something else to pass the time. She watches television.

The ride to work is just right to catch the latest episode of “The Office” on her iPod.

“I have a fairly hectic schedule,” says Nollet, a recent graduate of American University. “I don’t get to watch TV shows when they actually air.” Instead, Nollet keeps up on her favorite shows on her iPod, or at home on her computer.

Nollet is representative of a growing trend in the way young people watch television – that is, not necessarily on a television set. Recent studies show that people under 26 are driving a significant increase in television viewing on mobile phones, iPods and personal computers. As television programming has become more accessible online, some younger people have decided not to bother with a TV set at all.

Michael Marsden, a 20-year-old student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, does not own a television set and watches mostly on his computer. “It’s about scheduling,” Marsden says. “It’s easier to just watch it when you want.”

How this change among younger viewers will impact the television industry remains the subject of intense debate. Some believe that new technologies are already undermining what for many years appeared to be the TV industry’s unstoppable profit growth. They point to the February announcement by ABC News that it plans to cut its newsroom staff by 25 percent as evidence that TV is about to suffer the same fate as the ailing newspaper industry. But others argue that the younger generation’s thirst for video content online and on cell phones means that TV is entering a new golden age.

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that researches health-related issues, released a study in January examining how children between 8 and 18 consume electronic media. The study found that kids watched an average of four and a half hours of television programming per day in 2009, up 38 minutes from 2004. Yet the amount of time spent watching live on a TV set actually decreased by 25 minutes per day, to 2 hours 39 minutes. The difference was made up by a surge in TV watching on computers, cell phones and other mobile devices. Young people watched nearly an hour of programming per day on something other than a TV set in 2009, including 24 minutes on computers, 16 minutes on iPods and 15 minutes on cell phones, according to the study.

While those numbers are still relatively low, they show huge growth for a technology that did not even exist when the Kaiser Family Foundation last performed this survey in 2004. The Nielsen Company, whose television ratings are widely used by the industry to set advertising rates, now provides quarterly updates on mobile and Internet viewing. The latest figures show mobile as a small portion of television viewing but confirm the divergence between young and old. Youths 12 to17 years old on average watched more than seven hours of TV a month on mobile phones in the third quarter of 2009, compared to slightly under three hours for adults aged 25 to 34.

Television networks depend heavily on advertising for their profits. A 30-minute show viewed on a television carries about eight minutes of commercials. The cost of those ads varies depending on the popularity of the show, but a single 30-second spot can demand well over $100,000.

In recent years, illegally pirated versions of many of the most popular shows have become available for free online without commercials, generating no revenue for the networks. In response, the networks set up their own legal online viewing sites, but they have to limit the amount of advertising lest viewers return to the pirate sites.

As a result, shows seen online, or on mobile devices, carry many fewer commercials and bring in much less revenue than those seen on a television set. For example, an episode of “The Office” on NBC’s Web site comes with only a minute of advertising. The same show seen on Hulu, the popular Web site jointly owned by media giants NBC, News Corp. and Disney, carries a minute and 25 seconds of advertising. And on a mobile phone, it comes with two minutes of ads.

Pepperdine graduate student Paul Dietzel watches a TV program on his computer in Los Angeles on Friday, Feb. 26. (Photo courtesy of Judson Moore)

“Man, these commercials seem really long,” Paul Dietzel, a 24-year-old graduate student at Pepperdine University in California, remembers thinking the last time he watched live TV. Dietzel watches television every day but does so almost exclusively on his computer or iPhone. If they were faced with the full brunt of TV ads online, viewers like Dietzel might abandon Hulu for other sites. Hulu therefore cannot carry as many ads, or generate as much revenue, as the old TV set can.

But some experts think that the growth in online and mobile viewing will more than make up for the shift in advertising revenue. “There’s a popular conception that TV is dead,” said Ed Moran, director of insights and innovation at consulting firm Deloitte. “That’s not the case.”

A study released in December by Deloitte confirmed that total TV viewing is up, even if the numbers watching on actual televisions are not. Moran said that increased viewing hours, regardless of platform, showed that television would remain relevant. “The programming itself — that 30 minute show — continues to work,” Moran said.

Indeed, the Deloitte study found that 57 percent of people aged 14 to 26 listed watching television as among their favorite forms of entertainment, just two percent behind listening to music. It also found that 86 percent of young people said that their most preferred method to watch was on a home TV set, either live or recorded. That is less than older generations but shows that, at least in terms of preference, the TV set remains king.

Mobile media platforms have also proven they can help boost traditional television viewing. Young people use text messaging and social media sites to promote TV shows they like, creating a buzz and essentially providing free advertising for the networks.

“The Vampire Diaries,” a show especially popular with teenage girls on the CW Network, for example, has capitalized on social media networks to attract more viewers. The show’s Facebook page has over 500,000 fans and regularly attracts more than a thousand participants to chat about story lines and characters, like a recent online discussion, “Does Damon secretly love Elana?”

While online and mobile TV watching grows, its relationship with traditional TV will be more symbiotic than destructive, Moran argues. “New entertainment platforms tend not to extinct one another,” he said. “They tend to coexist.”

But with the potential of advertising on mobile devices still uncertain, a major question looms over the TV industry. Will the young people of today continue to watch more television on mobile platforms, or as they age will they behave more like older TV viewers?

“That’s the $64,000 question,” said Moran. “I don’t know, but here’s my guess: I think they’re always going to be the generation that’s wired and online.”