-By Alex Palmer

In spite of the rapid growth of new media, going to the movies remains a popular option.

Twitter, texting and social networking may be catching consumers’ attention, but traditional entertainment sources are still captivating, according to The NPD Group’s “Entertainment Trends in America” report.

While new media activity has seen a significant boost recently, respondents expected to spend slightly more watching movies in the theater, and buying digital music as they did last year.

The report, which polled more than 10,000 consumers online in August, found that in spite of new media’s growth, interest in traditional forms of entertainment is staying stable. Sixty-six percent of consumers plan to spend the same on entertainment products and services in the next year as they did in the previous year—particularly on seeing movies in the theater, playing video games and downloading music. This is 3 percent higher than 2008.

A full 72 percent of respondents said they would spend the same or more money on going to movies. “I tend to be more positive about going to the movies because that’s a social experience for a lot of people,” said Russ Crupnick, senior entertainment industry analyst for NPD. “We ask, ‘it’s Friday night, Saturday night, what are we going to do?’ The movies are still a great option.”

The study found that consumers are digging deeper into new ways of finding entertainment, but necessarily at the expense of traditional media. In fact, the two may boost one another. “New media needs old media in order to keep migrating mainstream, but old media needs new media to stay relevant. We wouldn’t know about Twitter if it wasn’t for the news on our TV,” said Christina Kerley, marketing specialist for ckEpiphany. “While new media will take a chunk of old media, that is not to say that one negates the other—what we’re finding is new media has to have integration.”

According to the report, the use of social networking rose 11 percent since last year. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they visited a social networking site over the past six months. Text messaging also rose 7 percent, with 63 percent of respondents reporting that they have sent and received text messages over the past year. Nine percent said they used Twitter.

“The question is, when does time start to become more important than money—at what point am I spending so much time doing other things that it really does start to impact my watching movies or reading books?” said Crupnick. “At some point you are going to start to see a collision within the categories.”