[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[Jim Lux]

At 10:38 AM 7/18/2007, Joe Landman wrote:
>Jim Lux wrote:
>
>>The average person spends roughly 3700 hours per year consuming 
>>enetertainment, of which more than 3500 are some form of audio or 
>>video (i.e. not reading)
>
>I would love to hear where that data came from.


Here's the breakdown... hours per person per year
for year 2004
Filmed Entertainment:
Cable and Satellite TV  1010
Broadcast TV 782
Consumer Internet 189
Home Video 78
Box Office 13 (e.g. movies and live theater)
Interactive TV 3
Subtotal 2075

Other
Broadcast and satellite radio: 1035
Recorded music 180
Daily Newspapers 169
Consumer Magazines 118  (obviously, this doesn't include reading Trans ACM)
Consumer Books  107
Video Games     71  (which seems low to me, but perhaps its strangely defined)
Subtotal 1680

These were summarized in a presentation I got a few years back, but 
they're based on data (in part) from a source like this:
http://www.mpaa.org/USEntertinmentIndustryMarketStats.pdf
which has 2006 numbers..

Take a look at slide #49


Now, clearly, these numbers are used as marketing stuff for filmed 
entertainment, so they're going to try and show as much film and as 
little non-film as possible.  But, the important thing is that it is 
a gigantic industry, and MS would love to be in a position to collect 
a nickle here and a dime there, because that gives  you that 
continuing revenue stream.

There's other stuff at that site.. in particular the "cost of movie 
piracy" which, albeit somewhat hyped, is interesting.  They do claim 
that the loss numbers aren't the speculative X bootleg copies figured 
at full list price, but rather is based on a statistical estimate 
based on the the number of legitimate copies that hte consumers would 
have purchased had the pirated versions weren't available.  20,600 
survey respondents.





James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875