The TVGuide.com Fall 2011 survey generated more than 5,800 responses from TVGuide.com’s 10,000-member research panel and is being released today at paidContent Entertainment in LA.  According to Christy Tanner, EVP and GM of TV Guide Digital, the panel’s demos and habits usually correlate with mass market general studies and tend to reflect the general U.S. population.

Overall, it found that the number of people watching more than 30 hours of TV per week (that’s more than four hours per day) has rocketed up to 32 percent of the population, a rise of 14 percent over the last year. In general, 93 percent of respondents said they were watching more than before.

That growth is largely coming from the rise of new technology, with some 55 percent of users said that they are watching TV online. The amount of time that people are spending watching online is growing fast: 15 percent of people are watching six or more hours of online video per week these days, a big spike on the four percent a year ago. Overall some 62 percent said they were watching for more hours than before.

That could be a reflection of user habits, but it’s also a testament to the growing amount of content that is available for them to view: the rise of services from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), as well as the existing offerings from the likes of Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and Hulu, will be joined by more programming offerings from Google (NSDQ: GOOG)—giving users potentially a far richer catalog of content via the internet than they have through their traditional TV sets.

That’s not to say that TV-based viewing is disappearing, but it is shifting—time-shifting, that is… Some 71 percent of respondents said they were watching more time-shifted content, using their own DVRs or those from their pay-TV providers, than they were a year ago.

Time (NYSE: TWX) shifting has been great news for those of us who are not able to keep to the timetables set by networks, but as many expected would happen, the technology is also leading to another inevitable problem: decreasing attention being paid to advertising.

An astounding 96 percent of respondents say they fast-forward through ads on DVR content these days—although some 44 percent did point out that they “don’t mind” ads as a general rule. Still, the number of people skipping ads on time-shifted content, and that growth of time-shifted content consumption seem set for some kind of collision course in the future.