Net starts to overtake TV

A new survey of internet consumer trends has revealed that people with broadband connections spend more time on the net than watching television.

The survey compared the entertainment and information consumption patterns of 864 Australian broadband users with those of more than 3,600 users worldwide.

It found that Australians with broadband spend an average of 22 hours per week on the web. They spend 14 hours in front of the TV and only three hours playing computer games.

The survey was conducted for technology company Cisco and the report was written by Jay Shutter, managing director of research firm Illuminas.

Mr Shutter said the figures show the increasing importance of the net to get access to entertainment and information content, even if some of this access is at work.

"Twenty-two hours on the internet, if somebody's doing online gaming, if they're downloading, I mean whatever they're doing, they're spending a lot of time," Mr Shutter said.

"That really doesn't surprise me.

"When you add it up, it seems like 47 hours doing all this stuff during the week, that seems like a lot of time.

"But you know what, we are, globally, a media-driven society; we spend time watching news."

Mr Shutter also said multi-tasking adds to the amount of time people spend on the web and using technology.

"People will always have a web browser open at the same time that they're in their email application," he said.

"People definitely do multi-task, if they happen to be writing in a word processing document or spreadsheet or whatever they might to be doing, they're most definitely also probably surfing the web at the same time."

The survey also revealed that online videos (whether that be feature length movies or user-generated clips) and music were the two most popular types of content on the net, with nearly half of Australian broadband users surveyed using this type of content.

However, the survey did not ask respondents whether they were using web mail, social networking sites or written content.

According to the survey, the two main reasons people gave for using online content were that it was free and available when they want it.