If you listen to cable company commercials in the U.S., you’ll notice that they now are all offering Wi-Fi hotspot locations that will allow you to watch any movie or TV show on any mobile device at any time. People are no longer restricted to either sitting in front of the TV or recording their favorite shows; they can simply watch it at any convenient time on their mobile devices.
This is not just happening in the U.S.; it seems to be a worldwide occurrence. Apparently there have been several studies conducted in the U.K. over the past year concerning this fact. At the end of last year the conclusion was that there were 300,000 fewer homes in 2013 that had TVs. In 2012 there were 26.33 million households with TVs as compared to 26.02 million in 2013.
While the number of TVs seems to have dramatically gone down, broadband connections have risen to just about the one million mark. The number of U.K. households with a television has fallen for the first time, due to the fact that viewers are switching to computers, tablets and smartphones to watch their favorite programs.
Online catch-up services, such as BBC iPlayer, ITV Player and 4OD, means that people’s favorite shows no longer need to be watched while they are broadcast but can be viewed later online free of charge. According to Ofcom, requests from mobile devices have risen from 25 percent to 47 percent.
Ofcom, or the Office of Communications, is the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the U.K. In a recent report titled “Infrastructure Report 2014”, it was revealed that based on the current broadband usage statistics, typical U.K. households may now need a connection offering at least 10 Mbits to support its Internet activities.
Broadband usage seems to be a two-way street; on the download side the numbers show that a typical U.K. household is downloading an average of about 53 GB of data on a monthly basis, which is about the same as downloading roughly 35 feature films every month, representing a 77 percent increase. On the upload side, the average home is also uploading seven GB of data to the Internet each month, which is equivalent to 3,500 digital photographs.
“Digital infrastructure is crucial to the U.K.’s future,” said Ed Richards, Ofcom CEO. “As a country we are continuing to make real progress, particularly in the rollout and take-up of superfast broadband and 4G mobile services. But there is more to be done. We need to continue asking whether collectively we are doing enough to build the infrastructure of the future, and to maintain the competition that benefits consumers and businesses. Our new interactive map is a simple way for people to check coverage for a range of services which are increasingly important in their lives. The way consumers interact with their TV, phone and broadband is changing as fast as technology is evolving.”
Over the past year there have been technological advances in many different fields. One area that has seen substantial improvement is the communications industry. For example, Rich Communications Services (RCS) is a program for the creation of inter-operator communications services based on IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS). This should provide sharing of rich content, as well as easy integration with other online applications.
Thanks to improvements in Voice over IP (VoIP), small businesses are able to conduct video and conference calls with all of their employees and clients regardless of their location. Will VoIP also have an impact on TV usage? As video quality continues to improve along with Internet speeds getting faster, I think that the answer to question is most likely yes.
Ofcom feels that there is going to be strong expectations that RCS and VoIP will take over the role of traditional voice services. When you add higher quality video services along with better sharing options into the equation it is easy to understand why broadband is rising and TV are fading away.