Another report looking at Australian media usage patterns in the wake of broadband has been released. You can download the report here. I caught Julian Thomas, one of the authors of this CCI report on the ABC’s Media Report this week and you can read the transcript here.

One of the most interesting things reported was that broadband has a disproportionate effect on the television medium over other ‘heritage’ media such as radio, books or newspapers. This is what Julian Thomas said about findings of the report in this area.

When you introduce broadband then the changes in people’s media consumption, what sort of media mix everybody has, really does start to have a big impact, and in that younger age group in particular, when you look at that group of people aged 30 or below, when they get broadband, about 60% of that group, a really substantial proportion, are saying they’re watching less television. What I think is also really interesting there though is that as you get into older groups, groups which are more the traditional market for television, for free-to-air television and Pay-TV, you’re also starting to see substantial numbers of people saying We’re watching less television, when they get broadband.

But the interesting thing about that is that this is particularly about television. Broadband means that people are more engaged with the internet. It changes access, as I said. But it changes in particular the relationship between people and television. It doesn’t make that much of a difference on some other media. So we also ask people for example about the effect that the internet had on the amount of time they spent reading books, and yes, it does make a bit of a difference, but it’s nothing like the difference that it makes for television. We asked people about the effect of the internet on the amount of time they spend reading newspapers or magazines, and yes, it does make a bit of a difference, but nothing like the difference it makes for television. So it’s quite striking that as the internet is evolving, is becoming an entertainment medium as well as everything else, you can really sort of see that people are shifting their time from TV to the net.

Some significant findings in the report are that 68.5% of internet users consider the internet an ‘important’ or ‘very important’ source of information compared with 32.6% for television, 46.6% for newspapers and 45.9% for radio. According to the report, the internet is also considered a more trustworthy source of information than television and is beginning to rival television as an entertainment medium. I was surprised that more people were not utilising the self publishing potential of the internet and that playing online games was, according to the report, a marginal activity of Australian internet users. As the internet continues to evolve as an entertainment medium it will be interesting to watch the growth of its creative potential.