With more television sets coming with Internet connection, we enter a new technological era where the web must compete with TV. When you have a single product that is found in 75% of every household in the world, you are looking at a potential to change how things are done. Research has shown that in the United States:
- Percentage of households that possess at least one television: 99
- Number of TV sets in the average U.S. household: 2.24
- Percentage of U.S. homes with three or more TV sets: 66
- Number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes
- Number of hours of TV watched annually by Americans: 250 billion
- Value of that time assuming an average wage of S5/hour: S1.25 trillion
- Percentage of Americans who pay for cable TV: 56
Number of videos rented daily in the U.S.: 6 million
Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900 hours
Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1500
Total spending by 100 leading TV advertisers in 1993: $15 billion
As Chris Anderson wrote in a recent article, when the consumer is given a dedicated platform from which they can choose what is given to them or what they can do, the web becomes a shrinking reality. Nowadays, we use an app to check our mail, post our location, and even combine twitter, facebook, and buzz into one interface. Gone are the days where you go to individual websites on a browser and now, bring in the future of a “post-HTML environment.”
Right now, Google is helping pave the road for the coming changes, built on HTML5. Recently, they announced GoogleTV, a service that allows you to view TV content from various sources, including the Internet, and bring them to you either from a top-box or TV manufacturers that have partnered up with Google. Also poised to revolutionize the Internet, is the “Internet Connected TV” which allows the development of apps to bring you content such as up-to-the-minute news and TV subscriptions like NetFlix.
As less and less consumers using the traditional browser rises, more people look for the convenience of having things when they want it, at a moment’s notice, something that Chris Anderson described as the “iPhone model of mobile computing,” an effect of having a fully-Internet capable device in the hands of all consumers. With the majority of the world having television sets, it was only a matter of time that people took notice that the big money is in offering something more than just cable television programming to keep you watching TV.
Source: App Market