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The average American watches more than five hours of TV per day, but pretty soon that leisure time may be dominated by YouTube and other online video services.
In an address at CES 2016, YouTube's chief business officer Robert Kyncl argued that digital video will be the single biggest way that Americans spend their free time by 2020 – more than watching TV, listening to music, playing video games, or reading.
The amount of time people spend watching TV each day has been pretty steady for a few years now, Mr. Kyncl pointed out, while time spent watching online videos has grown by more than 50 percent each year. Data from media research firm Nielsen shows that it's not just young people watching online videos, either: adults aged 35 to 49 spent 80 percent more time on video sites in 2014 than in 2013, and adults aged 50 to 64 spent 60 percent more time on video sites over the same time period.
Why the shift?
(Score: 2) by Bobs on Wednesday January 13 2016, @01:50PM
Taking an existing trend and projecting it out for years and assuming it will not change can lead to all sorts of wrong conclusions. Especially using statistics.
“In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-pole. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo [Illinois] and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” - Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1884)
(Score: 2) by Ken_g6 on Wednesday January 13 2016, @03:00PM
Good point, except you forgot the obligatory XKCD. [xkcd.com]
Not spending enough time online watching videos and stuff?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 13 2016, @03:08PM
My favourite example was once given in a talk (unfortunately I don't remember by whom). It was a nice exponentially growing curve showing the number of horse carriages in a certain time frame. Clearly a sign that the horse carriage industry would look into a bright future at that point. Then the speaker added the following years to the curve. It was going rapidly down quite soon. What happened? Well, the car happened.