Will the Internet Overtake Television in 2010?

Microsoft just published a rather thorough report on the future developments of the internet across Europe.  One of the bold predictions they are making is that it won't be long before Internet actually overtakes (traditional) television in terms of media consumption time.

To be precise, they predict it to happen in June 2010.  Whether the actual month is accurate is not that important.  It does show how far the internet has come from the days I first hooked up my 9.6Kbps modem.  In fact, rather than describing "digital" as a separate category, in a few years we may need to consider "non-digital" to be the odd one out.

Some other interesting predictions include that

• internet use on PC's will drop from 95% today, to 50% in five years
• mobile browsing will grow from 19% in 2008 to 30% in 2013
• 28% of Europeans watch short or full length videos online

Interesting times we're living in.

For the full report, have a look at http://www.scribd.com/doc/14065700/Europe-Logs-On

 

Tip of the hat to Kris for pointing me to this one.

Russia 3rd Largest Internet Country in Europe?

At a conference in Paris last week, I was talking with a friend from Moscow about the state of the Russian internet market.  Over the week-end this lead me to do some research and I was amazed at what I found.  This to the point of adding Russia to my list of "places to watch" on the online scene.

While at first sight the percentages of 7-22% internet penetration don’t appear that impressive, things get slightly more interesting when looking at the large cities.  Moscow, St-Petersburg and Ekaterinburg have 29% of the population go online once or twice a week in which 15% of the internet users use Wi-Fi to do so.

Where my attention peaked was when I translated these numbers into “people”.  Remembering that Russia with its 143,000,000 inhabitants isn’t really a small country, this essentially means we’re looking at 31.5 million people online.  Being hospitable in adding Russia to the “European hitparade”, this gives us:

1. Germany: 48.8 million
2. UK: 37.8 million
3. Russia: 31.5 million
4. Italy: 28.9 million
5. France: 26.2 million

In other words, today, in number of users, Russia is already the third internet market in Europe and considering its semi-vertical growth rates and potential, has a chance to become number one in the next 2-3 years. 

As the percentage numbers remind me of our “Western” situation about 3 years ago, I’d say in 2007-2008 the fun is really about to begin.