Is this statistic for the total hours watched each person or the whole family, meaning 4 people watching 1 hour of TV is 4 hours of viewing? Because I don’t see how anyone, even people who don’t sleep much, could have 8 hours a day for television.

That would require a person to get home from work at 5pm and watch until midnight or 1am continuously.

Those are household numbers. I assume that they are/were partially driven by people who are in the house much of the day having the TV on as more or less background.

And I'm sure that still drives the numbers. They probably seem really high to me partly because I pretty much only have the TV on if I'm actively watching something. Used to always drive me crazy if I would share a room with someone on a trip and the first they did on entering a hotel room was to turn the TV on.