.
Being a parent of an eleven year old and a 14 year old, I am more than a little familiar with the term “screen time.” If you have kids of any age you know what I mean, but let’s not blame the kids for this. We adults are all too guilty of excessive screen time.
Let’s face it, mobile video is taking over. There is no doubt about it. “In 2012, video traffic accounted for half of all mobile traffic,” Cisco says, “and that number jumped to 53 percent in 2013.” Cisco estimates that by 2018, more than two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video growing 14-fold over the next five years! To put that into data terms, by 2018, of the 190 Exabytes of total mobile traffic, at least 127 Exabytes of it will be video. Does anyone read anymore?
Who is making up these numbers? Who are the guilty parties?
In an article on MobileMarketingDaily.com, “The number of people watching video on smartphones (ages 2 and over) in the fourth quarter of 2013 reached 101 million, up from 80.7 million in the year-earlier period.” What’s funny is the “ages 2 and over” demographic. Never have we thought of a 2 year old being a target demographic before. But, again, let’s not blame the kids. Drilling into the number even further, here is how the average American spends their screen time per month:
- 23 minutes watching video on a smartphone
- 155 minutes watching video on TV
- 14 hours 40 minutes watching time-shifted TV (recorded video via a DVR)
- 27 hours using a PC or laptop
- 34 hours using apps or mobile web on a smartphone
That’s 78.6 hours per month of screen time, or about 11% of our time. That doesn’t sound too bad to me, granted there weren’t any stats for DVDs or heading to the movies, but who does that anymore? (DVDs no, but the movie theater, yes but only for the right flick). The point of the matter being, screen time has become a part of our daily lives apparently starting at age 2 now. I recently heard another stat that smartphone owners have their smartphone no more than an arms length away 90% of time. Man, are we ever tethered, but that is the new connected culture in which we live and work, and it’s only going to get bigger with the internet of things, wearable computing, and who knows what’s next.
Either way — whether we spend 11% of our month using a screen and keep it an arms length away, or in the future as we create even simpler tools to take advantage of information and entertainment — Seagate’s technology will interact with people more and more serving up the content we seek. And for those important quiet times when we aren’t in a consumption mood, we still have the off-switch — no problem, because when the time is right, the stuff stored on Seagate drives in the cloud is only a short reach away.
How much screen time do you spend a month?
That’s surprisingly little. I myself get about 200 per week and suffer from no health problems.