Realizing that worldwide longitudinal television research has exclusively been based on short sequences of cross-sectional data, it is argued that future developmental television research should use people-meter data in combination with time-series methods. To support this claim, several issues are investigated. It is demonstrated how telemetric TV data, which are collected continuously in all industrialized countries, can be used not only to validate findings based on cross-sectional data but also to expand our knowledge about developments in TV use by individuals and groups. This is an implicit plea to use these already-existing data pools for social and media scientific purposes. The examples presented are based on individual and aggregated trajectories of daily television viewing time covering a period of three years.
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