Britons increasingly engage in media multitasking while they...
Britons increasingly engage in media multitasking while they watch TV, said the U.K. Office of Communications in its latest communications market report (http://xrl.us/bpkbse). Just over half of all U.K. adults either “stack” (carry out unrelated media tasks while TV-viewing) or…
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“mesh” (interact or communicate about TV content they're watching), it said. Tablet owners are much more likely than average to multitask with other media, it said. Tablet ownership more than doubled in the past year, reaching 24 percent by Q1 2013, it said. One-third of owners said tablets are their main way of connecting to the Internet, and “bigger screen” activities such as watching TV or movies are becoming tablet-oriented, it said. The share of VOD requests coming from tablets rose from 3 percent to 12 percent from 2011-2012, it said. The research shows that “increasingly families are gathering in the living room to watch TV just as they were in the 1950s -- but now delivered on bigger, wider and more sophisticated sets,” said Ofcom Research Director James Thickett. Unlike the ‘50s family, they're also doing their own thing, he said: tweeting about a program, surfing the Net or viewing different content altogether on a tablet. A few years ago, people would talk about last night’s TV at work or school, he said. “Now, we're having those conversations live while watching TV -- using social media, text and instant messaging.” Other findings included: (1) Average hours of TV watched per day in 2012 increased from three hours and 42 minutes in 2004 to four hours. Seven percent of British households had a smart TV in Q1 2013, up two percentage points from the previous year. Despite the existence of more DVRs over the past five years, the proportion of time-shifted viewing remains low. (2) Over 90 percent of the U.K. adult population tuned in to radio each week in the 12 months to Q1 2013. More people are listening to the radio on their mobile phones. (3) Forty-nine percent of adults accessed the Internet on their mobile phone in Q1, with the biggest rise in mobile Internet takeup among 25-34-year-olds. Mobile advertising now accounts for over half of all digital ad growth. (4) People in Britain spent an average of more than one day per month using the Internet over a mobile network or fixed connection PC in 2012. Over a million new fixed broadband connections were added last year, and takeup of superfast broadband services (at least 30 Mbps) doubled since June 2012.