As Hollywood retools its product for the small screens of cellphones, its assumptions about mobile viewing are being upended by surprisingly patient consumers, according to the NYTimes.

“We all thought they’d be watching video clips in the checkout line or between classes,” said Vivi Zigler, the president for digital entertainment at NBC Universal. But owners of iPhones and other smartphones are actually watching long episodes and sometimes complete films, so a growing number of media companies are vying for people’s mobile attention spans. The result - companies, from Hollywood studios to local TV stations, foresee a wireless world that they don’t want to be cut out of.

In light of this shift some of the biggest local TV station owners in the United States announced a joint venture last month to transmit their content to viewers on the go. Roughly 17.6 million people in the United States watched video on their phones in the fourth quarter of last year, according to the Nielsen Company, up from 11.2 million 12 months earlier. They watched an average of three hours and 37 minutes of mobile video a month. In comparison, Americans watch on average 153 hours of traditional TV a month.

Ms. Zigler told the NYTimes that they have found that 60 percent of mobile visitors to NBC.com are coming from home, indicating that some people do not mind watching comedies and dramas on a palm-size screen even when a big-screen TV is nearby. “It’s pretty remarkable,” she said.