Nielson is giving us some new data on video viewing habits, and there are a lot of interesting interpretations you can draw from it. It’s particularly fascinating if you factor in some of the data I’ve collected on content use, and the results of my content consumption model.
At the high level, the Nielson study says that viewing is increasing slightly, fueled in part by expanded use of online material and in particular mobile video. But there is a direct correlation between the amount of traditional TV viewed and the age of the viewer, something I’ve also noted in my own models. The high-school-age crowd watches half the number of TV hours that seniors do. It’s how this statistic interpreted that’s significant.
The classic view is that we’re a population being weaned away from TV by online viewing. The reasoning is that as the population ages, the teen behavior moves up the ladder of age until everyone is watching half the TV. It’s plausible on the surface, but if you look deeper at the numbers you see some issues. In particular, if you look at the hours spent homebound for each population segment, you see that TV viewing is actually correlating nearly 100% with homebound time. In short, people watch TV when they’re home, and as they age they’re home more. Teens, who escape home with fervid determination to evade supervision, aren’t home to watch TV. It’s as simple as that.
Another interesting fact is that time-shift viewing increases quickly with age up to middle age, then declines. That shows that as people age, they reconnect with TV and develop a “show dependence” on favored material that they then record for later viewing. This demonstrates that the habit of not watching is being broken; why record something you didn’t even know was on and never watched?
Youth is using mobile video more, because they’re more mobile. The goal of “not-at-home” is a goal of avoidance; you have to tune your entertainment behavior away from place-dependence and thus toward mobility. It’s also more likely you’ll do this as a viewer not yet committed to network TV, without many “favorite” shows.
Moving more to the enterprise side, Red Had it releasing a beta of its OpenShift cloud platform. What’s interesting here is that OpenShift is a PaaS framework that’s designed to support development of cloud-enabled apps, not a virtual machine framework like an IaaS service would be. This could be a way of dodging big incumbents like VMware, but it might also be a recognition that cloud computing based on cloud-enabled apps is far more efficient and performs better than cloud computing based on non-enabled apps, no matter what the framework of the cloud.
Microsoft and IBM preach a more cloud-enabled app story than most vendors, and they also preach more PaaS, hybrid cloud, and private cloud. This month in Netwatcher we’ll take a more detailed look at the architecture issues here, and how enterprises are seeing their cloud plans developing.
In the economy, futures have responded positively to the jobs report, which beat the estimates in number of jobs added. Still, it does appear to me that job growth this spring has been slower than expected, no doubt pushed down by higher fuel prices. The good news there is that commodities in general are retreating, which I think is due to speculators clearing their positions as they realize little more growth can be expected. Gold and silver have also fallen, which suggests that even here we had a more speculative bubble than an arbitrage on the value of the dollar. I think we’ll see some improvement over the summer.