According to a report from Continental Research, as published in Campaign magazine, one in ten adults watches television on the internet.
Really? Already? Maybe “has watched”, but “watches” implies they do it regularly. Unless you want to catch up on last night’s Newsnight, or are engaged in downloading via bittorrent (both reasonably marginal activities still), then there’s not a great deal of content out there apart from promos for upcoming programmes, and, until last night, The Thick Of It.
But that’s not the least likely fact in the story. According to the same survey, 4% have viewed TV on their mobile.
I’m sorry, but do 4% of mobile phones even have the capability to watch TV on them? GPRS isn’t exactly ready for streaming, so we’re talking about 3G phones. I’m guessing that 3.99999% of that figure must be watching goals. Does that even count as TV?
The BBC’s iMP trial has allowed me to downlaod various programmes onto my Windows mobile phone, but that’s something that I’ve only been able to do in the last week or so (a fuller review of iMP to follow). Otherwise there’s the BT Livetime trial which uses “spare” DAB bandwidth on the Digital One national digital radio multiplex to broadcast Sky News, Sky Sports News and Blaze (a music videos channel). I’ve seen one of the trial handsets and aside from being rather bulky – supposedly due to the data they’re capturing for the trial – they work surprisingly well. I guess if you catch the bus home or something, it’s quite nice to catch up on the news, or maybe catch the goals from Sky Sports News at the weekend. Whether it’s good use of spectrum is another question. I suspect that they’re going to want to charge for the privilege of watching these channels.
But 4% remains to high a figure.