According to a recently released Cisco study, Australian and New Zealand broadband users are spending considerably more time using the Internet than watching television or movies and are downloading video in significant numbers.
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The survey also concluded that Australasians are interested in the concept of a single platform for storing and managing their digital content.
The Cisco “Connected Consumer” survey was carried by out last year by Illuminas among more than 1,000 Australian and New Zealand broadband users.
It follows similar studies by Illuminas in the United States and Europe since mid-2006. The study sheds light on a wide range of broadband consumer behaviours and interests.
From types of Internet access, to the extent of home storage of digital information, levels of wireless access, and use of mobile devices to access digital information.
A key finding of the survey, carried out amongst 864 Australians and 219 New Zealanders (November 2007), was that in a typical week, each person spends an average of 47 hours engaging in media-related activities.
Most of the time is spent on the Internet (22 hours) and watching TV (14 hours). This puts Australians and New Zealanders at the same level of media consumption as respondents in the United States (47 hours) and the United Kingdom and ahead of the four continental European markets surveyed (France, Germany, Italy and Spain).
Australians and New Zealanders also spend more time on the Internet than individuals in most of the markets surveyed, except for Spain and the United Kingdom.
The survey also discovered that those who do access the Internet on a regular basis via broadband networks are downloading video.
The study also found that 59 per cent of Australia and New Zealand Internet users watched or downloaded media content from the Internet in the previous 30 days.
Short video clips or music videos are the most often watched or downloaded (38 per cent), followed by news programming (25 per cent). Consumers in New Zealand are significantly more likely to have downloaded or watched short video clips than those in Australia (47 per cent vs. 36 per cent, respectively). The most compelling factor behind watching content online that it is free (51 per cent).
Convenience is also important for more than one-third of Australia and New Zealand consumers (37 per cent), as is the ability to view content missed when it originally aired (31 per cent).
The survey also found that when it comes to consumer choice in Australia, Telstra/Telstra BigPond is the clear leader (55 per cent) as the provider of multiple services such as cable, Internet, mobile phone, and video. Google and Optus Zoo each had 20 per cent of consumers considering it.
