Mobile entertainment, mobile social networking, Facebook - latest research

Yesterday saw Facebook make some major announcements about its mobile future. They see everything going mobile and it's hard to disagree with them. Just looking at the commuters on my train in the morning, I can see half the people busy on their iPhones and Androids twittering away and updating their Facebook status with a moan about leaves on the track. Wired report that 200 million people are already using Facebook on mobile phones — up from 65 million only a year ago.

Harris Interactive's Fast Forward tracking research has been keeping an eye on mobile social networking in the UK for more than a year. Even in this relatively short period, we have observed substantial uplifts in the usage of mobile for emailing, social networking, YouTube and Twitter.

Usage of Twitter and YouTube has doubled and mobile emailing and social networking has increased pretty much every quarter. No wonder Facebook are so focused on mobile.

Fast Forward is a free report Harris Interactive, providing key entertainment research tracking, content piracy and device ownership. You can download the full report for free here

Contact me if you want to know more:  techmedianow@gmail.com

Harris Interactive 

Entertainment research, device research, piracy research - Fast Forward Wave 8

Check out the latest research from the Technology & Entertainment team from Harris Interactive

Fast Forward Wave 8 is available - the full report is free and can be downloaded here

Harris Interactive's Fast Forward is a quarterly tracker of key entertainment behaviours, content piracy, device ownership & intentions and mobile entertainment.

The data is based on a Harris Poll survey of 2,000+ GB consumers aged 16-64, weighted to be nationally representative.

Over the last two years, we have tracked:

• YouTube viewing
• BBC iPlayer viewing
• Cinema attendance
• DVD purchasing & renting
• PC gaming (and game purchasing)
• Console gaming (and game purchasing)
• Legal music downloading
• Music streaming
• Mobile music

And we have tracked content piracy over the last two years:

• Music, movies and games via p2p
• Music, movies and games via cyberlockers like Rapidshare, Megaupload etc.

We track device ownership, including intentions to purchase. Devices tracked include:

• Nintendo Wii
• Playstation 3
• Xbox 360
• iPad
• iPhone
• iPod touch
• 3G smartphone (not iPhone)
• Blu-ray player
• e-Book readers
• DAB radio

I'll be blogging about some of the insight from Fast Forward soon - in the meantime, you can download the full report for free by clicking here

Contact me if you want to know more - techmedianow@gmail.com

Demand & excitement for 3D in the living room - 3D TV / 3D Blu-ray

3D, 3D, 3D, everything seems to be going 3D nowadays. We're all familiar with 3D in the cinema, but the big tech push at the moment is to get 3D into our living rooms and on the devices we carry around with us.

• 3D TV  see here
• 3D channels on Sky & Virgin Media  see here
• 3D gaming and Nintendo 3DS  see here 
• 3D Blu-ray  see here
• 3D cameras  see here
• 3D smartphones  see here
• 3D laptops  see here

But is there are any demand for it?

That's a question we ask ourselves at Harris Interactive. We've been asking about awareness, familiarity, buzz and excitement about 3D consumer products and services in August and September 2010. Using the Harris Poll, we interview over 1,000 consumers in Great Britain, nationally representative, aged between 16-64 each month to find out.

Let's first consider awareness and familiarity, which of course is vital for generating demand for all these (rather expensive) consumer products.

As you can see, 3D TVs, 3D Blu-ray, Sky 3D and Nintendo 3DS all manage to achieve creditable levels of awareness. They are not quite at the same levels as seen for iPad and iPhone 4, which we put in for comparison purposes, but creditable nonetheless.

Awareness is relatively strong for these 3D products, but the depth of familiarity is somewhat lacking. Consumers tend to be somewhat familiar at best, and most only either have heard the name somewhere or have never heard of it.

Of course, we are only at the beginning of the push for 3D in the living room. While 3D TVs are now rolling out and there is widespread advertising, the push for 3D Blu-ray is really currently aimed mostly for tech-heads and early adopter enthusiasts.

So, awareness relatively strong, deeper familiarity less so. What about the excitement of those who are at least somewhat familiar with these 3D products?

Bear in mind that we asked about excitement among those "somewhat aware" of each of these and this level varies by item. We've put the base of somewhat aware consumers in parentheses on the chart.

What we see is that among "people in the know", 3D is pretty exciting. 3D TV even manages to get on par with iPhone 4 and nudge ahead of the iPad - two products recognised to be pretty exciting tech of our age.

So what to conclude?

• Arguably some fairly strong evidence here that consumers, far from having 3D pushed down their throats, are pretty excited about it

• It's still fairly early days, but the depth of consumer familiarity with 3D in the living room definitely needs to be increased to stimulate more demand

Does this mean that 3D isn't a fad after all? Well, who knows frankly. It's something we'll continue to monitor at Harris Interactive.


All the data shown is available in Harris Interactive's latest Buzz report - it's FREE - download it here

Get in touch if you want to know more.

Illustrating the power of social media - iPhone 4 antenna issues and Jay-Z spoof "Newport"

In the latest edition of Harris Interactive's Buzz report, we looked at the awareness and buzz of two recent social media phenomena - the hoo-hah about antennae and reception problems for the iPhone 4 and the viral YouTube and Jay-Z New York music video spoof, "Newport". The original video has since been taken down due to copyright infringement, but whilst it was up it generated hundreds of thousands of views and various versions are can be found online.

Both of these are perfect illustrations of the power of social media. Would the iPhone 4 issues have made headline news across the world if it weren't for the power of blogging, YouTube and Twitter?




Speaking of spoof music videos, the iPhone 4 antenna issue has produced its own tune. This video lamenting the reception has, at the time of writing, been viewed over a million times. And this is just one video on YouTube. Add together all the tweets, the blogs, the complaining Facebook updates and coverage in the mainstream media and, all of a sudden, a technological flaw becomes a social media phenomenon.

But is all of this really just confined to the geekosphere? What about the general public? It's this sort of thing we like to find out at Harris Interactive.

Harris Interactive's latest Buzz report via the Harris Poll looked at how many consumers in the Great Britain aged 16-54 were aware of these two news stories. We interviewed over a 1,000 people online, representative of the national demographic.









So how many GB consumers were aware of these two stories at the end of August 2010?

• 62% of GB consumers had heard something about iPhone 4 antenna issues - with 21% saying they were extremely or very familiar with the issue

• 32% of GB consumers had heard something about the Newport music video spook - with 9% saying they were extremely or very familiar with it

That's a lot of people.

That's the power of social media.

The Buzz report not only looks at awareness of issues, we also investigate the degree to which it stimulates people to discuss a given issue. Of those who were at least somewhat familiar with the iPhone 4 antenna issue, a remarkable 55% said they had or will discuss it with their friends and peers. And the figure is 45% for Newport. No wonder news spreads so quickly and with SMS, email, IM, Twitter, blogs, YouTube and Facebook at our collective disposal, we now have the means of spreading the news - quickly and to anyone who cares to listen.

This makes the need for brands to monitor their social media all the more important. Harris Interactive can help. Get in touch with us if you want to know more. 

Download the free Buzz report here.

Harris Buzz - get the stats on the buzz of the latest tech, telecoms & media launches

At Harris Interactive, we do research into the newest product launches and hot topics in technology, entertainment, telecoms, media and social media.

We created Harris Buzz - a FREE REPORT - a monthly investigation of what UK consumers are aware of, discuss and are excited about in these sectors. The data is based on a Harris Poll survey of 1,000 UK consumers representative of national demographics.

The last two reports have looked at:

• 3D Blu-ray
• 3D TV sets
• Bing
• DAB Radio
• Dell Streak
• Digital displays
• Freeview HD
• Google Buzz
• Google Chrome
• Google TV
• iPad
• iPhone 4
• iPhone 4 antennae issues
• mflow
• "Newport" - Jay-Z spoof
• Nintendo 3DS
• PS3 Move
• Samsung Galaxy
• Sky 3D
• Spotify
• The Times online paywall
• Virgin Gaming
• Windows 7 Series for Mobile
• Xbox 360 Kinect

The report is free - click on the link to download the full PDF report.
Download here

And get in touch with me if you want to know more.
techmedianow@gmail.com

The Future of Entertainment Report from IGN.com & Harris Interactive

Check out The Future of Entertainment 2010 report from IGN.com and Harris Interactive.
Download the PDF report here

Find out about what consumers really think of 3D, HD, Blu-ray and motion control gaming.
It's a free UK research report that surveys a nationally representative base of UK consumers aged 16-64, compared to IGN.com visitors (a younger, male and tech savyy audience). Get in touch to find out more.

UK ahead of USA for content piracy

At Harris Interactive, we conduct a great deal of consumer research about piracy for the entertainment industry. In November 2009 we conducted an online survey in the UK and USA with a large quantitative base of respondents (2,000 interviews in each country) representative of the 18+ national demographic. The graph below shows the incidence of current content piracy in each country. Click on the graph to see the results.

Bearing in mind that this data is representative of the online population aged 18-64 and not just a sample of young entertainment consumers, we can see from the data why content piracy is such a problem for the music, movie and gaming industry. We can also see that potentially there is too much focus on p2p/BitTorrent as a source of filesharing as downloads from cyberlockers are highly prevalent.

We also see that our friends in the UK are somewhat ahead of their USA counterparts when it comes to downloading content when they shouldn't.

We have a lot more piracy data available at Harris Interactive. Get in touch with us.
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/europe/contact.asp

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