State of the Media Democracy Survey

Deloitte’s State of the Media Democracy Survey

Selected Highlights, U.S. Fourth Edition

TV, Meet the Internet

• Over 70% of U.S. consumers rank watching TV in their top three favorite media activities. And when ranked alongside activities such as surfing the Web, listening to music or reading, 34% of Americans place it at the top of the list – a 26% increase from last year
• Over the last 6 months, U.S. consumers have watched their favorite TV programs on the following platforms:
– 77% watched them live on their home television system
– 30% watched them via their DVR on their home television system
– 17% watched them via a free online video service (Hulu, TV.com)
– 18% have watched via the show’s Internet site – up from 13% last year
– 10% viewed them from a video-sharing site (like YouTube)
– 3% watched them on a portable MP3 video player
– 2% watched them on their mobile/smart phone

The Mobile Phone: Lifeline for the Connected Consumer

• 47% of U.S. consumers state their “Smart Phone” is one of their three most valuable media & entertainment products; ranking it as #4 among owners – up from #10 last year
• U.S. consumers are frequently/occasionally doing the following with their phones:
– 72% are test messaging – up from 65% last year, and increases across all generations
– 42% are accessing the Internet– up from 36% last year
– 30% are using mobile online search
– 27% are downloading apps to their phone
– 26% are using GPS – up from 9% last year
– 15% are purchasing products

Videogames: The Shadow Distribution Platform

• Across all platforms, more U.S. consumers are playing newly released videogames than a year ago:
– 47% have played via a home console – up from 31%
– 42% have played on their PC – again up noticeably from 26% last year
– 17% have played on a handheld – up from 11%
– 13% have played on a mobile phone/smart phone – up from 4%

The Dawn of Tribal Marketing

• 65% of U.S. consumers frequently/occasionally visit Websites as a result of someone’s online recommendation
• 55% of U.S. consumers believe strongly/somewhat that online consumer reviews and ratings influence their
buying decisions more than any type of online advertising – 69% of Millennials
• 51% of U.S. consumers have purchased a product based on an online recommendation

Media Consumption Habits Across Generations – Rethinking What You Know

Deloitte Insights podcast

Transcript of Media Consumption Habits Across Generations – Rethinking What You Know

Excerpt of Cecily Cohen, Head of Strategy, Planning and Insights for North America markets at Nokia

Host: What does the future hold for the evolution of mobile devices?

Cecily: I think our idea what a device is, is going to change significantly in the coming years. We are already starting to see the emergence of what is called emerging devices, whether they are netbooks, or tablets, or e-readers—they may even be wearable devices, but what you are seeing is, there are multiple screens that are going to be available to consumers. And they are going to serve different purposes throughout the consumers’ day depending on what they are doing and where they are.

And so, I expect that what you will also see as a result of this is that consumers will increasingly expect to see their content available in a pretty consistent fashion and form wherever they are and whatever device they are using and so we will see a rise in cloud services. We will see an expectation from consumers that they will be able to pull their content—the same content—out of the cloud down to their smartphone or onto their tablet or onto their e-reader or onto their television or PC.

The second area I think where we can expect some interesting things in the future is around contextuality again having this ability to marry location and your personal network and also information—metadata that is out there—to provide a really contextually aware experience for you.

One of the exciting trends coming along is around augmented reality, which allows you to impose metadata over what you are seeing in front of you with your own eyes, and so there are a couple of great examples out in the market right now.

There are some services that allow you to point your phone up at the sky and your phone will show you what you are viewing through the lens but also show you the names of the constellations, superimposed on top of the images that you are viewing in real time in real life. You will see a marriage of things like information about pricing, or information about shopping, or information even about people superimposed over the reality that you are seeing right in front of you. So, some really exciting opportunities to marry all these massive amounts of information that is out there and make it relevant and immediate for consumers.

ZON: O operador com a maior Rede de Nova Geração em Portugal

Resultados referentes ao 1º Semestre de 2010

Excertos

A ZON apresentou hoje em conferência de imprensa, no Auditório do Edifício Pinta, os Resultados referentes ao 1º Semestre de 2010. No 2T10 o Resultado Líquido aumentou 41,7% para 13,6 milhões de euros, assim como as Receitas de Exploração em 9,5% para 216,2 milhões de euros.

O ARPU Global registou um acréscimo anual de 6,2% para 35,6 euros, impulsionado pela continuação da adesão a novos serviços e pelo aumento da penetração de Triple Play, que continua a ser um dos principais impulsionadores de crescimento e rentabilidade da ZON. Quase 1 em cada 2 clientes de cabo da ZON subscrevem pacotes de Triple Play. No final do 1S10, 571,9 mil subscritores eram clientes de Triple Play, ou seja, 49% da base de clientes de cabo, o que representa um crescimento de 180,9 mil (+46,3%) face ao 1S09.

O operador com a maior Rede de Nova Geração em Portugal

Em Julho foi atingida a marca dos 100 mil clientes com ofertas de Internet de Banda Larga de velocidade igual ou superior a 50 Mbps, representando 15% da base de clientes de Banda Larga. De acordo com dados publicados pelo regulador, referentes ao final do 1T10, a quota de mercado implícita da ZON em serviços de Nova Geração já atingia os 59%, o que implica que a soma dos clientes de todos os outros operadores de Banda Larga era inferior ao número de clientes da ZON.

Ao todo, o número de clientes de Banda Larga da ZON aumentou 13,6% para 650,1 mil, representando uma taxa de penetração da base de cabo de 56%. No 2T10, a ZON lançou um novo “ZON HUB”.

Em termos de WiFi, a solução com base nos clientes da ZON, “ZON FON”, tem provado ser um enorme sucesso. Já existem em Portugal mais de 100 mil pontos de acesso, a mais extensa rede sem fios do país, permitindo acesso grátis a todos os utilizadores de Banda Larga da ZON.

No 1S10, a ZON lançou ainda um sistema de Protecção de Internet, em parceria com a F-Secure, uma das empresas líderes mundiais na área da segurança informática.

Upgrade da rede para Eurodocsis 3.0 praticamente finalizado, cell splitting e implementação de rede backbone em curso.

O upgrade da rede da ZON para Eurodocsis 3.0 está praticamente completo, permitindo assim proporcionar velocidades de Banda Larga de até 200 Mbps a quase toda a rede de cabo. No 2T10, a ZON migrou com sucesso todos os seus sistemas para um único data centre, localizado na sua própria infraestrutura, possibilitando uma maior optimização de sistemas, flexibilidade e racionalização de custos, sem interrupção das operações correntes.

A ZON continua a construir a sua própria infraestrutura de rede, para realojar hubs em locais próprios. De um total de cerca de 40 localizações espalhadas por Portugal, cerca de 10% já foram transferidas com sucesso para infraestruturas próprias, encontrando-se em curso negociações relativamente a contratos com fornecedores chave para permitir o realojamento dos restantes locais ao longo dos próximos dois anos.

The Web Means the End of Forgetting

Excerpt from The New York Times Magazine

By Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University

(…)

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

(…)

Predicting Social Security numbers from public data

From Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)

Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Communicated by Stephen E. Fienberg, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, May 5, 2009 (received for review January 18, 2009)

Predicting Social Security numbers from public data

Abstract
Information about an individual’s place and date of birth can be exploited to predict his or her Social Security number (SSN). Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals’ SSNs and their birth data and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies and quantify privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums.

OECD report “The Future of News and the Internet”

A new OECD report looking at “The Future of News and the Internet”. It contains new data and analysis on the global newspaper industry and the challenges presented by the Internet. Its main message is that “large country-by-country and title-by-title differences and the data currently do not lend themselves to make the case for “the death of the newspaper”, in particular if non-OECD countries and potential positive effects of the economic recovery are taken into account.” The full report, including data and charts, is available here.

After very profitable years, newspaper publishers in most OECD countries face declining advertising revenues, titles and circulation. The economic crisis has amplified this downward development.

About 20 out of 30 OECD countries face declining newspaper readership, with significant decreases in some OECD countries. Newspaper readership is usually lower among younger people who tend to attribute less importance to print media. In OECD countries, the general, regional and local press have been hardest hit and 2009 was expected to be the worst year for OECD newspapers, with the largest declines in the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Canada, and Spain (but much a much smaller impact on countries such as Austria, Australia.

But in emerging economies, for example, the average daily paid newspaper circulation has been growing for a number of years by about 35 per cent in the BIICS countries from 2000 to 2008, most notably India with a 45 per cent increase in circulation between 2000 and 2008, South Africa (34 per cent) and China (an estimated 29 per cent). Other countries and continents, including Africa and South America, are also gaining readers. This rise has compensated for the drop in OECD paid circulation and led to an actual increase in the number of world newspapers – by 14 per cent from 2002-2008.

The report also analyses who is reading news online: one key finding is that for the most part reading news online complements other forms of news rather than replaces it. Most surveys show that active offline newspaper readers tend to read more news online. In some OECD countries, more than half of the population read newspapers online but at the minimum one in five people do so. The willingness to pay for online news is low but increasing, it says.

The report also looks at the business and policy issues facing the industry. Among these is the question of government funding: in the short-term, some OECD countries have put emergency measures in place to financially help the industry. The question is being debated what potential roles government support might take in preserving a diverse and local press without putting its independence at stake.

It includes a comparison of the different measures and levels of support available to media in OECD countries.

Why Are Web Sites So Confusing?

From Harvard Business School Working Knowledge

Why Are Web Sites So Confusing?

Do you sometimes get the feeling that Internet portals, search pages, social networks, e-commerce, and other Web sites are not necessarily designed in order to maximize user convenience and benefits? We do, too.

Why—you might ask? For a fundamentally similar reason to why some retail stores place the most popular items (e.g., bread, milk) in the furthest possible place from the entrance; that shopping malls seem designed to make sure you get lost at every single visit; and that popular magazines drown the content they carry in a sea of advertising with no clear table of contents and split stories.

Indeed, all of these intermediaries are in the business of matching consumers with products. Trouble is, prior to visiting an intermediary, consumers are interested only in some products, which may not necessarily be the ones that yield the highest margins for the intermediary. If the latter was offering a perfect information service (i.e. one that enabled consumers to find what they want most quickly and efficiently), it would be losing valuable potential revenues. Hence the incentive to attract users with products that they want a priori and then divert them towards products that they might be interested in ex-post (i.e., once there).

Thus, consumers coming to the supermarket to buy daily staples (say, bread and milk) might be induced to also get expensive chocolate if they have to walk past the corresponding aisle anyway. Shoppers visiting a mall for its anchor store (say, Macy’s) may decide to stop by a small design store while walking around the mall. And while flipping through the pages of a magazine in search of the article promised on the cover, readers are exposed to advertising, which produces most of the revenues.

In the same way, Google faces a subtle issue in designing its search result pages: consumers are mostly interested in the “objective” (i.e., middle) search results, but all revenues come from the sponsored search ads on the right hand side. The result is a compromise between what users want and what produces more revenues. For any given search, the 11th objective search result might be more relevant than any of the sponsored search results displayed on the right; yet it will be displayed on the second search page only—well beyond the reach of most users.

Most e-commerce sites nowadays (e.g., Amazon, iTunes, Netflix) use recommendation systems to suggest to each individual user products or content which might interest him/her, as inferred from their past behavior or the behavior of users with similar profiles. How much should you trust those recommendations? Not entirely, of course: while consistently irrelevant recommendations would eventually drive people away, the sites have an incentive to steer users to the products that yield them the highest margins—which may not always coincide with the ones that best correspond to users’ preferences.

So how bad is this apparently insidious form of “search diversion”? (It started in the brick-and-mortar world but the digital economy provides many more subtle ways to divert search.) Well, it may appear that users lose whereas some vendors (and the intermediaries) benefit, but in a world without perfectly efficient search, potentially valuable product-consumer matches might go unrealized. Thus, enabling those matches through search diversion may, to a certain extent, provide a net benefit to society.

Turns out, there are benefits which go beyond that. A recent and thought-provoking Science article (“Electronic Publishing and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship”) shows that as library search has gotten vastly more efficient with the advent of digitized libraries and online search tools, the depth of scientific research has suffered. Scholars in a variety of fields tend to reference fewer articles and cast a narrower net when conducting their background research.

The old, inefficient search method, which relied on index cards and inevitably entailed flipping through pages of not necessarily relevant journals, had the benefit of exposing scientists to a wider range of ideas, which could potentially also widen the scope of their research. This kind of serendipity can turn out to be a vastly more valuable consequence of search diversion than stumbling upon new products at the supermarket or while browsing aimlessly through Amazon.com.

Published: October 19, 2009
About the authors
Andrei Hagiu is an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.
Bruno Jullien is a senior researcher at the Toulouse School of Economics.

A arte da sinopse

Dois exemplos magistrais, ambos britânicos, da arte da sinopse.

“Inception” (“A Origem”) argumento de Christopher Nolan
Em entrevista a Mário Augusto, membro do Júri do Prémio ZON Criatividade em Multmédia, Leonardo Di Caprio resumiu numa frase o enredo do filme: Um homem quer ir para casa ter com a sua família e acontecem-lhe coisas.

“The Ghost Writer” (“O Escritor Fantasma”) argumento de Robert Harris com Roman Polanski
A sinopse do filme segundo o site oficial: Quando um escritor-fantasma britânico de sucesso, THE GHOST, aceita completar as memórias do antigo primeiro ministro britâncio Adam lang, o seu agente assegura-lhe que é a oportunidade de uma vida. Mas o projecto parece condenado desde o início, não apenas porque o seu antecessor no projecto, um adjunto de longa data de Lang, morrera num infeliz acidente.

Universidade Lusófona: Over & Out

O Over & Out é uma mostra anual dos melhores trabalhos produzidos pelos alunos das Licenciaturas em Cinema, Vídeo e Comunicação Multimédia, Animação Digital e Fotografia e dos Mestrados em Estudos cinematográficos e Sistemas de Comunicação Multimédia da Universidade Lusófona. Este ano esta mostra decorre de 26 a 29 de Julho na Fábrica da Pólvora em Oeiras e no LXFACTORY, culminado com uma sessão de encerramento e entrega de prémios aos melhores trabalhos, dia 29 de Julho pelas 21h30 horas no Grande Auditório do CCB em Lisboa.

Zynga: o novo Google dos jogos?

The Zynga Game Network is the hottest start-up to emerge from Silicon Valley since Twitter and, before that, Facebook. Unlike Twitter, which has meager revenue, Zynga is on a path to pocket as much as $500 million in revenue this year.

While Facebook needed four and a half years to reach 100 million users, Zynga crossed that mark after just two and a half years.

Zynga’s empire is made up of cartoonish online games. And most striking, given its financial success, is the fact that the games are free to everyone. Zynga makes money, by and large, only when a small fraction of its users pay real money for make-believe “virtual” goods that let them move up in the games or to give their friends gifts.

For instance, in FarmVille, its most popular game, players tend to virtual farms, planting and harvesting crops, and turning little plots of land into ever more sophisticated or idyllic cyberfarms. Good farmers — those who don’t let crops wither — earn virtual currency they can use for things like more seed or farm animals and equipment.

But players can also buy those goods with credit cards, PayPal accounts or Facebook’s new payment system, called Credits.

Zynga has been valued at more than $4.5 billion.

Its games have 211 million players every month, according to AppData.com. Though that figure counts a user for each type of game he plays, it makes Zynga about four times larger than its nearest rival, Electronic Arts. Playdom is third, with 41 million users.

Extractos de New York Times