Online TV viewing 'on the rise'
Almost half of European broadband users are using their computers to watch television online, a survey claims. — The ability to "take control" of their viewing was the motivation for many users said Motorola, which interviewed 2,500 people including the UK.
Context & Ripple Effects
There is no earlier story in this corpus to anchor an arc — this Motorola-commissioned survey stands alone as a snapshot of where European TV habits stood in spring 2007. Its weight comes from the number itself: of 2,500 broadband users polled across Europe including the UK, almost half already watch television on their computers, and Motorola's framing of why — viewers wanting to 'take control' of when and what they watch — doubles as a pitch for the set-top and device business Motorola sells into.
First-order effects
- European broadcasters and pay-TV operators now have survey-backed evidence that a large minority of their broadband subscribers treat the PC as a second TV, putting pressure on schedules and channel bundles built around appointment viewing.
- Motorola converts its polling into positioning for its own hardware roadmap, arriving with data just as rival device makers push living-room boxes.
Second-order effects
- An unconfirmed claim circulating since March 2007 holds that devices like Apple's new TV box and DVRs from TiVo, Motorola and Cisco could spell the end of the traditional 30-second commercial — if on-demand habits spread from the PC to the living room, that rumor becomes the industry's central pricing question rather than a side note.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, TV's economics migrate from selling scarce prime-time slots against a fixed schedule to whoever controls the on-demand interface — device makers and platform owners capturing value previously held by broadcasters.
The trend: Broadband penetration is turning the personal computer into a television set, transferring scheduling power from European broadcasters to viewers and the device platforms that serve them.