MaxxoMedia Digital Media and Entertainment Trends

A new study has uncovered the obvious: More young people, aged 18 to 34, are going online or using handheld devices to watch TV content. The number doing so rose from 34 percent of those surveyed by Horowitz Associates in 2009 to 39 percent in 2010 according to the “Multiplatform Content and Services Study.”

“The data clearly show that when it comes to the next generation of multichannel customers we should be concerned about the ongoing and future value of the video/pay TV elements of our service offerings and the strategies in place to deal with them,” Howard Horowitz, president of Horowitz Associates said in a new release. “The penetration and usage of alternative viewing technology is reaching a tipping point and the measurable impact on how the TV product is viewed will inevitably follow.”

Via Mashable: If you needed more proof that texting is on the rise, here’s a stat for you: the average teenager sends over 3,000 texts per month. That’s more than six texts per waking hour.

According to a new study from Nielsen, our society has gone mad with texting, data usage and app downloads. Nielsen analyzed the mobile data habits of over 60,000 mobile subscribers and surveyed over 3,000 teens during April, May and June of this year. The numbers they came up with are astounding.

The number of texts being sent is on the rise, especially among teenagers age 13 to 17. According to Nielsen, the average teenager now sends 3,339 texts per month. There’s more, though: teen females send an incredible 4,050 text per month, while teen males send an average of 2,539 texts. Teens are sending 8% more texts than they were this time last year.

Teens Cell Phone Habits

47% of US teens say their social life would end or be worsened without their cell phone, and 57% credit their mobile device with improving their life. Four out of five teens (17 million) carry a wireless device (a 40% increase since 2004), according to a study by Harris Interactive.

American teenagers send an average of 10 text messages per hour they are not in school or sleeping. By analyzing more than 40,000 monthly US mobile bills, in Nielsen new study determined American teens sent an average of 3,146 texts a month each during Q3 2009. Their counterparts 9-12 sent an average of 1,146 monthly texts each, or four per hour not spent asleep or in school.

The Kaiser Family Foundation has the results in from its latest media usage study, and it was enough to shock the authors.

The last time the Foundation looked at the media usage of 8- to 18-year-olds was five years ago, when they were at just shy of six and a half hours of media consumption per day. At that point, the study authors felt that they must have hit a ceiling on media usage.

Not so, according to the latest study, which puts the average up more than an hour to upwards of seven and a half hours per day. Plus, for the first time, time spent watching TV actually dropped in favor of other forms of media, including listening to music, using a computer, playing video games, reading print publications and watching movies.

Image by William Hook via Flickr

Live television is still tops with kids. But when it comes to activities after that, younger kids generally go to DVDs and DVRs, while older kids head to the Internet.

Almost half of kids 6-11 use the Internet, versus one-fifth of those ages 2-5. Not surprisingly, the biggest time slots are weekends, after school and after dinner, according to the Nielsen Company.

Despite the fact that “sexting” (trading steamy text messages) has become quite the problem in schools today, James Lipton has managed to get a laugh out of us with his PSA warning kids to refrain from trading pictures of their junk.

It’s common knowledge that teens are all about getting textual, but there’s been a recent rash of coverage in the media dealing with how the under-21 set is misusing the technology. In short: while you used to steal away under the bleachers for a quick…you know…today’s kids are letting their fingers do the talking–on their iPhone keyboards.

Naturally, LG turned to Lipton — of Inside the Actors Studio fame — to remedy the problem via their Give it a Ponder campaign. The result is a hilarious, if not slightly creepy, video that is likely to have absolutely no effect on today’s youth, who have no idea who Lipton is.

Jaroo.com is hoping to become the ultimate online video destination for kids. Launching with more than 50 popular TV series, and some 500 episodes available on demand, this kids-friendly service is hoping to stake a claim to the 9.5 percent of U.S. Internet users age 11 and younger in the U.S. Those Internet users are spending 63 percent more time online than they did four years ago, some 11 hours per month, according to Nielsen NetView.

Jaroo–from Canadian company Cookie Jar Entertainment–will feature 22-minute episodes–with 90-second commercial breaks–of “Inspector Gadget,” “The Adventures of Paddington Bear,” “Johnny Test,” “Super Mario Bros.,” “Zelda” and “Madeline” as well as the exclusive U.S. premiere of “Mona the Vampire.” Cookie Jar said it will add new episodes and shows daily.

Today’s high school and college students are hardly newcomers when it comes to email. The mean number of email addresses per student surveyed is 2.4. Most college students have had an email address for about 8 years, with the average student getting an initial email address at the age of 13. When students choose a primary email service, Gmail is the clear favorite. 32% of college students use Gmail as their primary email address, 19% yahoo, 18% MSN/Hotmail and only about 17% use their school email address as their primary address. If you’re looking at marketing to this group through online channels, Google’s advertising network is one to seriously consider, according to a recent Student Survey by eROI.

Effectiveness of Email Marketing
Students can be an elusive demographic for marketers. Staying on top of constantly evolving trends is the key to gaining trust and staying relevant to the student market, but another challenge in reaching them is knowing which channel will carry and present your message most effectively. Students, on average, read marketing emails on a “rarely to never” basis, with 61% falling into this category. Only 16% are reading marketing emails on a frequent basis, while 66% of students rarely or never take action on marketing emails. Most college students do not feel that companies are effectively speaking to them personally.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., September 16, 2008–Market research and consultancy, MultiMedia Intelligence, announces the release of its free whitepaper on the US wireless teen market, characterizing the market for mobile phone services by US 12-17 year old teens. The whitepaper is free to download at http://www.MultiMediaIntelligence.com

The teen market is an especially appealing market for two reasons. First, it is a primary source of new subscribers for carriers. Less than 40% of pre-teens have mobile service. By age 17, 84% of teens have wireless services, with the penetration skewing higher for females. Second, teens teach older demographic how to use their handsets.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 93% of teens use the internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction — a place where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others. 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004. Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation:

• 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys
• 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys.
• 19% of Online boys post video content online, compared to 10% of online girls who have posted a video online where others could see it.

47% of online teens have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least “some of the time.” Many teens, however, limit access to content that they share.

The Nielsen Company announced some of the findings of an in-depth study, “Kids on the Go: Mobile Usage by U.S. Teens and Tweens,” on the mobile media and cross media behavior of U.S. “tweens” (ages 8-12), finding that 5% of tweens access the Internet over their phone each month.

While 41% of tween mobile Internet users say they do so while commuting or traveling (to school, for example), mobile content such as the Internet is also a social medium for this audience. 26% of tween mobile Internet users say they access the web while at a friend’s house and 17% say they do so at social events.

The report estimates that: