The couch potato is becoming a desk potato...or a potato who lies in bed with its laptop, or... Okay, never mind the cliché.

Point is, a new study from IBM, unveiled Wednesday, found that more people waste their lives away spend time consuming ungodly many, many hours of media on the Internet than they do the television.

The survey found that 19 percent of respondents globally said they spend six hours or more per day on personal Internet usage (so that doesn't count work Internet hours), versus 9 percent who spend that much time watching television. Sixty-six percent said they spend between one and four hours a day viewing television, versus 60 percent who spend one to four hours of their personal time online.

"Television usage is continuing to grow, but what we're finding is that in certain segments, people are spending more time on the Internet relative to watching television," said IBM's head of media & entertainment strategy and change Saul Berman, who conducted the survey as part of a study on changes in advertising that he's going to unveil in October. "I'd go as far as to say that the younger generation when they graduate from college, they're not going to think they need a cable subscription or a satellite or an IPTV subscription from a telco, because they're going to get all of these things on the Internet and put it on different screens and different devices, and there are some pretty radical shifts that can take place because of that."

IBM's survey of 2,423 adults in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and Japan skews disporportionally towards women and young people. Also, it was conducted online and took up twenty minutes of some people's lives, which means that all of the respondents are already Internet users, and therefore presumably more likely to use the Internet heavily for their media habits... no?  i.e. if you conducted a survey via the television, wouldn't you be more likely to find heavy TV watchers?

The study also doesn't specifically address whether the Internet is gaining on television as a percentage of total time users spend consuming media. A study that came out earlier this month from the private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson (link here) said that television and radio combined for 70 percent of total media consumption among Americans, versus the Internet's five percent, according to a Reuters article.