Broadband Britain takes a hatchet to old media

Newspapers and TV are losing out as broadband Britain is increasingly turning off from old media and turning to the internet for news and entertainment, research has found.

A new report from analyst house JupiterResearch has found that European TV watchers are spending less time watching the box and more time surfing the web. The report, Evolution of Media Use in Europe - Web Impacting Consumption found 27 per cent of Europeans are spending less time watching TV in favour of the internet, compared to 17 per cent in 2001.

It's not just TV that's suffering, however - the web is nibbling at consumers' reading time. In 2004, 18 per cent of European adults reduced the amount of time they spent reading papers, with just 13 per cent saying they did the same in 2001.

Previous research carried out by the analysts in the US and Australia found broadly similar results - and that could well mean bad news for TV companies in particular, the report found, as the trend could well be a knock-on effect of broadband penetration.

With more and more homes becoming broadband enabled across Europe, TV companies could see their viewers start to drop off.

Although the broadcasters haven't noticed their overall viewing time dropping so far, JupiterResearch is predicting that TV viewers and web watchers will start to polarise along age lines.

'Younger' users, those below 54, will continue to decrease their TV time while those 55 and over will remain devoted to their tellies.

Olivier Beauvilain, analyst at JupiterResearch and author of the report, said that while broadband converts have been swapping newspaper reading for getting news from the web, the shift from TV to internet is a more significant shift.

"For the TV time transfer, people are going home and preferring to connect to the internet for one hour, two hours rather than switch than on the television... it's cannibalising different activities," he said.