Skip to main content

Decline of "Passive" Entertainment Consumer

Attracting early-adopters is critical for vendors of new consumer electronics devices, and the profile of the informed progressive user is changing, according to the latest market study by In-Stat.

Early technology adoption is no longer constrained by income, education, ethnicity, or social status. As a result, a larger percentage of young adults than in the past consider themselves to be early-adopters.

"Whether it is TV Everywhere initiatives, over-the-top video services, Web-to-TV devices, or 3D digital televisions, the market success of each new innovation will be dependent on attracting early-adopters," says Keith Nissen, In-Stat analyst. "Yet, many of the characteristics that defined early technology adopters in a pre-Internet world no longer apply."

In-Stat's research identifies that U.S. early-adopters are much more likely to: Subscribe to premium pay-TV channels; Two-thirds get at least one premium channel; Over 50 percent receive HBO; Subscribe to a DVR service; View VoD content; View fee-based on-demand movies; Purchase pay-per-view content; Subscribe to fee-based sports content; Spend more than 5 hrs per day viewing video content.

I would add one key evolutionary characteristic to In-Stat's list -- early-adopters believe that the traditional pay-TV offering is becoming obsolete and prohibitively expensive, that's why they've embraced a Neflix subscription service.

Netflix subscribers manage their personalized content Queue based on trusted adaptive recommendations, and consider the traditional one-size-fits-all linear TV channel model to be archaic, by comparison. Therefore, the "passive consumer" era is doomed to a rapid decline.

In-Stat's market study found the following:

- By 2013, nearly half of total U.S. households will have an adult that considers themselves to be a leading-edge or early-adopter of technology.

- In-Stat recently developed new end-user segmentation that identifies Power, Social, and Passive consumers. Segmentation is based on the number of different Internet activities and the frequency that they are performed.

- Over the next five years, Internet power-user households will double in number, and nearly two-thirds of U.S. broadband households will be power or social users.

Popular posts from this blog

AI-Driven Data Center Liquid Cooling Demand

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and hyperscale cloud computing is fundamentally reshaping data center infrastructure, and liquid cooling is emerging as an indispensable solution. As traditional air-cooled systems reach their physical limits, the IT industry is under pressure to adopt more efficient thermal management strategies to meet growing demands, while complying with stringent environmental regulations. Liquid Cooling Market Development The latest ABI Research analysis reveals momentum in liquid cooling adoption. Installations are forecast to quadruple between 2023 and 2030. The market will reach $3.7 billion in value by the decade's end, with a CAGR of 22 percent. The urgency behind these numbers becomes clear when examining energy metrics: liquid cooling systems demonstrate 40 percent greater energy efficiency when compared to conventional air-cooling architectures, while simultaneously enabling ~300-500 percent increases in computational density per rac...