The Future of Entertainment
For the last 5 years we had not had a TV in our house. Never felt the need to. I loved watching movies which I usually caught in the theatres or brought the VCD home. This article ( WSJ story ) makes an observation that people with the internet at home spend less time watching TV. Which was the case with me back home and more so now with the permanent ethernet link in my room. Internet is like oxygen. Its not only a necessity but I might die without if I lose connection for more than 5 minutes.


Another interesting thing to note was that radio is increasing in popularity. Why? Because it can consumed on the go. As the article notes people now has less time and want to pack more in their day and hence listen to music, radio and at the same time are doing some other things too.
Of course normal broadcast TV however hard it tries cannot match the increasingly diverging tastes and still hope to cater to everyone in this era of specialization.
The article then talks about a new term called 'co-viewing'. A show that more than one person watches. Such shows are reducing and the savvy ad men are now moving to other avenues of advertising. Maybe video games will be interrupted with ads in the future. You never know.
Major Flaws
This graph shows that the time spent reading has dropped a bit, rather was not much to begin with. I think this is flaw in their definition of what reading is. It does not tell the complete story. What about the amount of reading people do online ? I mean every magazine, newspaper is online. I bet that the weekly average will be much higher than what is shown on the graph. As you can see that the internet time has increased to 3 hours. So despite all the smut on the net, there is lots to read too.
To complicate matters they put donwloading in the internet category. Now if you leave you computer connected for hours at end to download. Was that counted? Also what about the case if you are listening to music and reading somebody's blog.
It would nice to have another graph showing two activites carried out simultaneously. In a case like running on the treadmill and listening to your i-Pod.