Slashdot Mirror
The Internet Is Finally Going To Be Bigger Than TV Worldwide (qz.com)
According to estimates from media agency Zenith, next year, for the first time, people will spend more time using the internet than watching TV. People will spend an average of 170.6 minutes a day, or nearly three hours, using the internet in 2019. That's a tad more than the 170.3 minutes they're expected to spend watching TV. Quartz reports: Zenith measured media by how they are transmitted or distributed, such as broadcasts via TV signals and newspapers in print. Watching videos on the web through platforms like Netflix and YouTube, or reading a newspaper's website, counted as internet consumption. Nearly one-quarter of all media consumption across the globe will be through mobile this year, up from 5% in 2011. The average person will spend a total of about eight hours per day consuming media in its many forms this year, Zenith forecasts.
In some parts of the world, TV will remain on top -- for now. Zenith forecasted media consumption through 2020 and did not expect the internet to overtake TV in Europe, Latin America, and the whole of North America in that time. In the U.S., it was projected to surpass TV in the U.S. in two years.
In some parts of the world, TV will remain on top -- for now. Zenith forecasted media consumption through 2020 and did not expect the internet to overtake TV in Europe, Latin America, and the whole of North America in that time. In the U.S., it was projected to surpass TV in the U.S. in two years.
But...
If you measuring by "time spent" you're already onto a statistical problem.
It's SO MUCH quicker for me to watch an episode of something on Netflix than on TV that it's laughable. And I watch exactly what I want and then switch off. And I don't have ads, and intros, and recaps, etc.
I imagine that Internet is already used much more than TV for such viewing. But because the Internet is about "I want to watch X and nothing else", and TV is about "I'll wait for X to come on, and then sit through any", it won't win on "minutes" but I bet it wins on "episodes".
TV is dead. Scheduled programming is dead. It's either "live" (a minority of special events) or "on-demand" and there's no need for anything in between. It's just a question of how long, to be honest.
(-- Does not own a TV. Does not watch broadcast TV. I have a projector, a smartphone and a laptop. The closest I get is TVPlayer, which I got for a year on a special deal and which relays broadcast TV legally over the web to your devices. It works. I barely touch it. For almost everything it's easier to just wait a few hours and pick up from catch-up at my leisure, with pause and all kinds of features to make viewing more comfortable. Maybe, just maybe, if aliens landed or something, I'd watch it for one source of live news, but that's it. But I'd still watch the majority online.).