By David Weir | Feb 16, 2010
There have been persistent reports of high-level talks between Microsoft and Disney for some time now, though no official announcements yet of any deal to stream movies or TV shows such as ESPN sports programming over the Xbox gaming portal, for example.

This study of eight-to-eighteen-year-olds in the U.S. concluded that they spend an average of 7.5 hours per day with media last year, and that — due to multi-tasking — they pack an average of 10.75 hours of media content into that average media day.

This level of usage has increased by 30 percent over the past five years!

Here’s the breakdown by medium (time spent=hrs:mins):

TV	4:29
Music/Audio	2:31
Computer	1:29
Video games	1:13
Print	0:38
Movies	0:25

Over the past ten years, according to Kaiser, media consumption has increased in every category but print. (Reading is down by about 11.5 percent.) Use of computers and video games has more or less tripled during that time.

According to the study, 20 percent of this media consumption today (2:07) occurs on mobile devices, including cell phones, iPods, or handheld video game players.

Almost an hour per day consists of watching “old” TV or music content repurposed via computers. Thus, while they actually spend less time watching TV content during its scheduled broadcast time, young people increasingly view it on computers or mobile devices.

Which brings us back to those discussions between Disney and Microsoft. As reported by The New York Times, “Executives at Microsoft are fond of saying that its subscription gaming service, Xbox Live, should be thought of as a cable channel…[Already] the roughly 20 million monthly members of Xbox Live can surf Facebook, browse an online mall of movies and TV episodes and, if they pay, watch Netflix.”

What the Kaiser data indicate is that, to an unprecedented extent, the emerging generation of media consumers is now doing all of those things simultaneously, which bodes well for platforms like the Xbox, which reaches some 40 million users, half of whom already subscribe to Microsoft’s “cable channel.”

 

Know More:
http://industry.bnet.com/media/
10006482/as-microsoft-and-disney-chat-kids-media-consumption-explodes/

Back to News List