[rcoveson]

In terms of hours invested, I don't think going to the movies ever got close to the 50's rate of television consumption. I can find stats as high as 90 million tickets/week, which (if we assume 100% double features) may have been as much as 400 million hours per week. With a US population of 130 million, that's roughly three hours per week per capita. Compare that to television in the 1950s, which nearly reached 5 hours per capita per day. That's over 10x the time investment.

Radio, on the other hand, seems like it may have done similar numbers to those of TV. But I'd be interested how different those modes of consumption were in practice. Certainly some people watch TV in the background, and some people listen to the radio while doing nothing else, but I would bet the rate of watching TV while doing nothing else was far higher than that of radio.