The Future Now

By Harry van Vliet on 9 January 2009

Today we see that the developments are heading for an increasingly digitized world. The number of households with a digital television connection, for instance, is rapidly increasing. In the space of two years the sale of flat screens has overtaken the sale of traditional television screens and pushed the latter to the margins, meaning that currently about 40% of Dutch households are watching TV on a flat screen, while at the same time these flat screens generally have a bigger image diameter than the replaced set and are also suitable for HDTV. But at the more general level too the number of broadband connections continues to grow, as well as Internet use, downloading of films and music; the mobile market is already more than saturated, whereby it is not unusual for people to own more than one mobile phone. The number of websites, blogs, digital social networks and content on the Internet all continue to show a rising line. And there is still strong confidence in new platforms such as mobile television (breakthrough in 1 to 3 years) and IPTV (breakthrough in 3 to 5 years). This does not of course mean that there are no obstacles to the roll-out of such services.

Today we see that the developments are heading for an increasingly digitized world. The number of households with a digital television connection, for instance, is rapidly increasing. In the space of two years the sale of flat screens has overtaken the sale of traditional television screens and pushed the latter to the margins, meaning that currently about 40% of Dutch households are watching TV on a flat screen, while at the same time these flat screens generally have a bigger image diameter than the replaced set and are also suitable for HDTV. But at the more general level too the number of broadband connections continues to grow, as well as Internet use, downloading of films and music; the mobile market is already more than saturated, whereby it is not unusual for people to own more than one mobile phone. The number of websites, blogs, digital social networks and content on the Internet all continue to show a rising line. And there is still strong confidence in new platforms such as mobile television (breakthrough in 1 to 3 years) and IPTV (breakthrough in 3 to 5 years). This does not of course mean that there are no obstacles to the roll-out of such services.

These developments are highly visible and unmistakeable, but we still need to put things a little more in perspective. Half of the time we devote to media is still television-related, and in the Netherlands the time even amounts to two-thirds. To quote one figure, the number of hours devoted in Great Britain to watching the BBC on television is in itself ten times greater than the number of hours spent worldwide in watching YouTube. The average American spends half an hour each month on social network websites, but 4.5 hours a day on television. So it?s no surprise that all sorts of products (Apple?s AppleTV) and services (Joost) arise which are closely linked to the television platform. In 2007 1.7 billion television sets were in use worldwide as compared to 1 billion PCs, while just a quarter of the latter have a broadband connection. There are 2.1 billion mobile telephones worldwide, of which only 285 million can process new media and even of these a much smaller number are actually used in this way. Worldwide, publishing is still the biggest source of income (800 billion dollars) for television (350 billion), film, radio, music and video games. 439 million people in 210 countries still buy a newspaper every day. Every year 1.4 billion magazines are sold, as well as 3 billion books every year. The advertising market is dominated by television, newspapers and magazines/journals with a turnover of 500 billion dollars.

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