The next media consumer generation spends more time ever being entertained. 8-18 year olds spend 10:45 hours per day enjoying TV content, listing to music, being on the computer, playing video games, reading or watching movies. That’s an increase of 25% percent over the last 5 years.
Where is that growth coming from?
The largest portion of it has been technology facilitated by the introduction of mobile devices. Music and gaming profit the most from this technology. Reading and watching movies are not part of the overall growth. Print content consumption is declining and movie content, only occupying 25 minutes of the whole media pie to begin with, is staying flat. Tablets, which were not included in the study and which allow all media content to be on one device and in one space, will only increase this technology based development.
There are two challenges the content industry will have to address:
Who is my competition now? On mobile devices it is not anymore a competition within a content category, but also competition against other forms of media content. Now books directly compete with games, magazines, movies, newspapers, social media sites, etc. for the same consumer. I think, transmedia projects, that can capitalize on a brand over different forms of content, will thrive.
We have already seen the development to smaller more bite-sized content. Downloading a song vs. buying a CD. Reading single articles on social media sites from various sources vs. buying a newspaper or magazine. This development leads to the question: What is the right format for content on mobile devices? Is a 90 minute feature film the right format for the future? Definitely not on mobile devices, but if the entertainment industry wants to participate in the growth of the media market it will have to find ways to tell stories in a different format.
Sources: Generation M2, Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year Olds, A Kaiser Family Foundation Study, January 2010
