Whether you agree with the saying “content is king” or not, a Harris Interactive study revealed that 81% of users said they are more likely to download and store digital content today than they were just one year ago. I still recall the days of my first computer, a Commodore 64 which had no hard drive and I was limited to “floppy discs” and today with a 80 gig laptop it still isn’t enough storage space for me.
What are consumers downloading?
Family photos, home videos, thousands of songs, video games, and full length TV shows and movies are what consumers crave today. Just over half, 57% of the respondents agree the files are more valuable then the computers their stored on.
What is driving consumers to download and store more data?
Usability is still a driving factor that creates the user experience that consumers have grown to be more comfortable as the consider using digital media and technologies, and they are downloading and storing digital “stuff”
with a vengeance. This in turn has been driving an almost insatiable demand for more and more gigabytes to safely store and manage all
this content.
More findings on how consumers consume digital content:
- An overwhelming 96% of U.S. adults own and use at least one desktop or laptop computer in their home
- Computer users in households with a child under the age of 18 are significantly more likely than users in households without a child to download/store music (45 percent vs. 28 percent), games (26 percent vs. 17 percent), and movies/videos (23 percent vs. 13 percent) nowadays as compared to a year ago
- Women computer users (55 percent) are significantly more likely than men (46 percent) to report that they download/store photos more nowadays as compared to a year ago
- Adults who report having a child under the age of 18 in their household (64 percent) are significantly more likely to own one or more video game consoles like Microsoft Xboxes
- And, one-in-four adults own and use Digital Video Recorders (27 percent) from TiVo or other sources or an external hard drive (24 percent)
As much buzz as Apple’s announcement of the iPhone has been there is already a lot of talk that its 8 gig storage space will not be enough, and that is on not-yet released product. How big will hard drives need to be to meet consumer demands by 2008?
