Another TV-watching-cat owner here. Ours would stare at shows with either birds or cats on the screen, but his favorite was auto racing. Whenever a race would be on, he’d jump on the TV and every time a car went by he’d swat at the side of the screen where he thought it would come out.
My cat watches the computer screen. He’ll bat at the cursor, blinky pop up screens, sometimes even scrolling text.
He also hunts the octopi on my screen saver, keeps trying to scoop it up from on top of the computer. tres cute.
I was given one of those cat videos, he doesn’t watch. It’s badly done tho. They keep cutting to different angles and zooms on their little birdies etc, rather than keep a fixed frame with the fish or whatever doing the moving. That’s what gets his attention.
My cat absolutely loves Donald Rumsfeld. When Rummy was a kitten, during the 9/11 times, we couldn’t tear that cat away from the TV. We even named the cat Rumsfeld. Another one of our cats, Toto, derives a certain pleasure from watching dogs on Emergency Vets.
When a kitten, my cat used to run up to the screen whenever motorcycle racing was on, and swat the motorcycles. Strangely, she never attacked Formula 1 cars. She doesn’t do it anymore.
I don’t have a TV-watching anecdote, but something similar.
When I was living in St. Petersburg in 1995, another exchange student kept a kitten in her dorm room. She left a mirror on the floor one day and the kitten thought his reflection was another cat. He’d see the mirror from across the room, raise his fur at it, charge the intruder and bat at him, then go around the mirror to get at this new fellow behind the glass. He never could seem to figure out where the jerk went at that point.
Most of the cats I’ve known seem oblivious to the television. One of the cats I have now never pays attention to it (except when I turn it off, since that means it’s time to go to bed), but the other is definitely a watcher.
For example, a couple of months ago, I was flipping through channels and came across the opening credits for the movie Grease! , which are a cartoon. I would have kept on going, except that Lucia sat up and began to watch the screen with apparent interest; I waited to see how long she would watch. She sat in front the TV, paying close attention until the credits ended. Once the film went to live action, she lost interest and wandered off.
I’ve tested her a few times since, and she does watch cartoons and other simple images where there are just one or two objects moving on screen. She also reacts if she hears a cat meowing or dog barking on TV.
My 18 year old neutered tom named Clapton also recognises the image of a cat in the mirror (his own image).
But Clapton hates the Kitty in the mirror, and would kill him if he could.
My current cat could care less about TV except for the sounds it emits sometimes (shrieks and other high-pitched TV noises seem to disturb him). However, we did have a cat who enjoyed wildlife shows and would poke her nose around the back of the TV when an animal disappeared off the side of the screen. Another cat perked up and watched attentively during a slo-mo scene shot in black and white instead of color.
My cats have a similar tape (perhaps the same - after all, how many of these can there be) and they watched it the first couple of times I put it on. I think it was called “Video Catnip.” I haven’t noticed them paying attention to the TV in ages, though I don’t watch too many nature shows.
My two just spent an hour sitting side by side up close to the TV watching Stuart Little. I like to think they were following the story, but doubt if they were. Whenever the cats showed up on screen they definitely perked up, though.
Wow! Thanks for all of the great replies. It sounds like some cats at least “seem” to watch TV, at least some times, although one can never really know for sure. It’s nice to know that there are others who have wondered (and noticed) the same thing that I have.
Obviously they were rooting for the good guys.
My cat watches movies with me. She wakes up for the musical numbers in Victor/Victoria but she is right there in front of the TV watching Ice Age whenever it’s on. If she wanders off for any reason, she’ll be right there in a flash when she hears Scrat making his weird noises.
She loves this movie. She recognizes the music, or seems to, because she’ll come running whenever one of the kids puts it in. One night when it was over, she sat and meowed at us until someone started the darned DVD over again and then she sat in front of the TV and watched it, getting up to paw at the screen whenever Scrat came on.
A former cat, deaf as a post, showed no interest in anything on TV until she came in one night when I was watching a baseball game. This, for some reason, fascinated her. Maybe it was the bright red cardinals on the uniforms.
Dolphinboy, I took pics of my cats avidly watching Stuart Little as a matter of fact. If you need proof for your OP, drop me a message and I’ll send you one.
I’ve heard they cant watch TV. But I’ve seen them staring at it. Dont know if it just jerky movements they are seeing or actually pictures.
I’ve also heard that cats cant see flat images like posters or photos. When we took our cat Mad Max to the vet we had to avoid one of the exam rooms because there was a poster of a large orange tabby on the wall. Max would hiss at it, bob his head up and down and whip his tail back and forth when ever he saw it. If you tried to get in between him and the poster he would try to get around you.
Have a quick look at post #9, kiddo. 
My helpful anecdote is that my kitty would lay on top of my computer monitor and occasionally bat at the mouse cursor.
Wow. I posted this question 13 years ago and it’s still getting responses.
My cat has since disappeared and now I have a 1 year old Jack Russell Terrier who sits on my lap in and watches TV with me. If there is a video or film of an animal on the screen, even if the sound is turned down, he will jump off my lap and run up to the TV barking wildly. He also has a problem with seeing children and people of color on TV as well as in real life, although I have no idea why that would bother him. I assume he thinks the TV is a window since if I open the front door he will run outside looking for the animal that he just saw on TV.
I am trying to desensitize him to seeing animals, children and people of color, whether on TV or in real life, with only a limited amount of success. We live where lots of people have horses and he barks like crazy every time he sees one.
I’ve noticed he doesn’t seem to care about an animal video on my computer, although he will run around the house looking for the barking dog even though you would think he would see it on my laptop as plainly as I do.
So is Mad Max now a zombie cat from 2002?
My one cat is terrified of a small stuffed tiger and will hiss and run out of the room when I bring it out. Also keeps the cat out of my bedroom. 
Neither one of my cats paid any attention to the Cat DVD I bought. I think it’s because I leave them outside on warm summer days so they know what real live birds and squirrels sound and act like so the DVD is boring for them.
I had a cat that persistently used to try to steal the basketball from Magic Johnson, FWIW. To his credit, Magic never turned the ball over to her.
Cat Loves Battlefield 2: this cat is watching the screen pretty intently from close range. He appears to be responding to the rolling of the horizon, and also is visually tracking some of the aircraft zooming by on-screen. Impossible to say what he thinks it all is, but it seems clear that he sees it all.