Nov 20, 2015 06:25 PM EST By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

The options of watching television online will not influence the amount of time a person spends viewing television, according to a recent study.

However, researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas found that TV watching options online does make the experience more pleasurable.

"Some media reports predict that because people now have access to watch anything they want, anytime they want, they will spend more time watching TV,"  Dr. Stan Liebowitz, a managerial economics professor in the Naveen Jindal School of Management and one of the study's authors, said in a statement.

For the study, researchers looked at television consumption during the switch from broadcast TV to cable TV. Because data of current trends in Internet TV viewing won't be available for another 10 to 15 years, the authors prognosticated what's going to happen based on what's happened in the past.

They found that viewing time essentially stayed the same, regardless if the variety of available TV shows increased. Liebowitz said consumers have only 24 hours in a day, so giving them more variety does not mean they're going to spend more time watching television.

"Additional program choices imply that people will be more likely to find a television show that more closely matches their taste," Alejandro Zentner, an associate professor of finance and managerial economics, said in a statement. "Because the Internet has brought about additional program choices, viewers get greater enjoyment."

The findings imply that people who are consuming their TV in binges do not change the total time they spend watching TV

"Instead, they're just changing what content they're watching," Leibowitz said.

The findings are detailed in the Journal of Cultural Economics.

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