The Changing Face of Video Entertainment

17th September 2012: New figures released today by the British Video Association (BVA) show how people’s video watching habits in the £2.3 billion retail business are evolving as they adapt to digital technology.

The new insights are contained within the BVA’s 2012 Yearbook, which is packed full of industry data.

This year’s statistical digest shows, for example:
• 17% of people aged 13-79 have a tablet computer and 8% plan to buy one in the next year. 64% of these tablet owners have downloaded an entertainment app and 60% choose to watch video entertainment on it rather than their PC.
• One in two mobile phone owners have a smartphone and 62% have downloaded an app that enables them to watch entertainment.
• Digital consumers are big purchasers of physical discs, with 34% of digital consumers having bought and rented a DVD/Blu-ray and having visited the cinema.

There remains, though, a group of digital sceptics who continue to be very attached to their physical discs. This isn’t because they are technophobes however. Some respondents said it was because they liked to buy physical discs as gifts, some liked to have the physical product on display. Others were concerned about the storage capacity on their devices. This issue should reduce as cloud services, such as UltraViolet, become more common. For some people their internet speed is still too slow and others are worried about losing the content.

While physical discs are here to stay for the foreseeable future, there is a much more complex video market emerging, which will see more people consuming video entertainment digitally as well when it suits them. A number of barriers still exist to the growth of the digital market but these are expected to reduce as new services become more mainstream and technological advances such as the roll out of 4G and the UK launch of UltraViolet take place.

Commenting on the publication of the BVA’s statistical year book, Lavinia Carey, Director General of the BVA said: “All the BVA’s research demonstrates that you need to dig deep under the surface to genuinely understand how the digital environment is affecting the video entertainment industry. It’s too easy to say the physical market is on the way out - there is a much more complicated story emerging in which people are buying discs and digital services at the same time. Yet we can see that the digital market is increasing and the barriers to consumers engaging in this market are dropping away all the time. It’s an exciting time for our audiences and we constantly introducing new services to meet their needs.”
 

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