When less is better

There is a widely held opinion that online media has eaten print media and has now moved on to television. This thesis, although it seems logical and has been repeated many times, is fundamentally incorrect. Printed media have been eaten by smartphones, and television is also threatened by them. The internet is just an intermediary here, and to be fair, all cable channels and streams are now streamed over the internet and watched from apps. Only the screen size is different.

Although it is difficult to make comparisons with the time before 2008 when the era of smartphones gained momentum, we remember well that there were a lot of popular online portals even then. They did take part of the audience with print media, but the reading was demanding. You had to be at the computer, either at work or at home, and there were few people who opened their laptop in public transport just to see "what's new".

With the proliferation of smartphones, everything changed. In all life situations today we will see a person with a phone in his hand, in every type of transport, in the waiting room, even behind the wheel, which is life-threatening. Analyzes show that in the battle with the mobile phone, computers are also losing the race. More than eighty percent of users of a portal access it from a mobile phone, and that percentage still has room for growth. Computers are read by those who have them at their workplace or work on them from home. In all other situations, the phone is used.

A person who already has a phone at hand does not need to go to the newsstand to get a newspaper, the content on the phone is mostly free and more diverse. With the development of artificial intelligence and automation of translation, even language will no longer be a barrier, you will be able to read "Zhenmin Zhibao" in your own language when even the Chinese, just as the texts on vreme.com will be linguistically accessible to everyone in the world. And the video goes in that direction - artificial intelligence already very successfully translates the spoken word while keeping the color of the original speaker's voice. It's not quite perfect, but it's making progress.

For a long time, it was believed that this would not happen with television, or rather with a TV set, primarily because of the size of the screen. It was considered that it was not the same to watch a movie or a game on a phone screen, even if it had almost seven inches, as on a television six to ten times larger. Now experts note that there is room for a story about the distance at which the screen is located and the width of the field of view. In this case, the screen of the mobile phone, which we hold in our hands, is not much smaller than the screen of the television, which is located a few meters from the viewer.

An additional motive is the different interests of the household members. Since everyone has a phone, there is no arguing about what to look at in the main screen because no screen is primary anymore. Netflix also noticed this by monitoring the behavior of its subscribers. It turned out that in the evening prime time their program is still watched mostly (60 percent) on TV. But during the night and early morning, smartphones came closer, and they are coming closer in the morning as well, although not so much yet. Our daily habits are determined by the screen on which we will watch something.

However, the most interesting information, which BB Media found, is that the size of the screen is determined by the average salary. In Asia (India, Indonesia, China) as well as South American and African countries, where incomes are low, video is primarily viewed on the phone. In the US and Europe, where wages are better, television is still preferred. This is explained by the fact that today everyone has a smartphone, even the poorest, while television is an option. In the poorer households of Asia and Africa, they never had it, and it seems that they never will. Just as young people in the West have less and less of it. With the support of the advertising industry, which could not have dreamed of a better medium than the telephone, the trend is irreversible.