Why is this important?

Of course consumers use PCs and laptops to watch TV programmes. But generally for specific programmes that were missed on TV, in relatively low volumes each week.

But we always felt that mainstream audiences wanted to watch catchup TV programmes on the TV screen. These latest figures prove that when they can, they do.

Here’s an appetizer: we asked mobile phone owners what they could do on their phones and what they’d like to be able to do (if they couldn’t already.)

Here are the Top 10 things they said they wanted to do: (‘I can’t do this, but I’d like to’, Essential Eye, March 2012.)

1. Recognise things through the camera (e.g. pictures) and tell me what they are (23%)
2. Pay for things by swiping my phone on a scanner (21%)
3. Find my location using GPS (21%)
4. Scan bar codes and use it to bring up information (21%)
5. Give me directions to where I want to go (20%)
6. Make cashless payments in a shop for things costing less than £15 (20%)
7. Translate things from one language to another (20%)
8. Give me directions to where I want to go (20%)
9. Recognise a song and tell me what it is (19%)
10. Receive promotions or vouchers to save money at places close to where I am (18%)

Conclusions:

• There’s a bright future for M:Commerce and cashless payments.
• Simple utility appeals to the next wave of smartphone adopters more than mobile internet / email / social media (we’ve heard that before somewhere) Mobile networks and handset manufacturers should focus on these benefits to drive the next wave of smartphone adoption.
• Shazam should be very excited.

More soon.

S

It paints a comprehensive picture of your target audience: what they’ve got, how they’re using it, what they see as beneficial and how they are changing their media consumption.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be sharing all sorts of Essential Eye insights, but in the meantime you can get a quick overview here.

Stuart

Essential_Eye_Press_Release

Insight and the Art of Storytelling

Incidentally, we’ve been running freebie storytelling training for our clients recently. So if you’re one of our clients (or think you might be soon) and fancy some free storytelling training, give us a shout.

It’s also interesting that there’s so little reference to smartphones in this. The new Google TV interface can be controlled by an Android smartphone; the iPhone works very nicely as an Apple TV controller and allows us to set our Sky+ box from afar. We increasingly rely on our smartphones to control many of the other things that matter in our life. Isn’t it a logical next step – if only to reduce some of the clutter on our coffee tables? Discuss.

If you ask tech-savvy teenagers to choose between a TV, a mobile and PC internet (as the survey does) many of them will quickly work out that if they choose a laptop or a mobile, they could do many things on it: talking to friends, listening to music, visiting websites, keeping up with people on Facebook, playing games, following celebrities on Twitter, sending partially-clothed images of themselves to school friends. And watching telly. The TV, on the other hand, looks rather one-dimensional by comparison. Logic, innit.

Slides from today – Slideshare

Just in case you should be in the vicinity of Olympia on 18 Oct, I’ll be sharing a platform with Nigel Whalley of Decipher at the Streaming Media Europe – Connected Home conference. And I will be talking about consumers: how they are changing, what they are doing, and what they need from technology and content providers. And if that all sounds a bit vague, it is. I haven’t written it yet. But I’ve got a month…