Internet eating into TV time in U.S. -expert
Reuters Story - August 27, 1998 06:14
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NEW DELHI, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Internet surfing and use has reached a point in the United States where it is fast cutting into television viewing, an industry strategist said on Thursday.
"It has reached a point where it is eating into television time," said Gene DeRose, chairman and chief executive officer of consulting and research firm, Jupiter Communications.
DeRose, who was speaking at India Internet World, an international conference on the subject, said there had been fast growth in online purchases, which would play a key role in consumer marketing by sharply focusing on price levels.
"People are going online with intended purchases in mind," said DeRose, adding that research studies showed 77 percent of the people going online had specific purchases in mind.
Online purchases of consumer goods in the United States alone were expected to grow to $37.5 billion by 2002, sharply up from $5.8 billion estimated for the current year, he said.
He said the Internet was not yet a major phenomenon for large audiences, however.
"Even in the U.S. it is not a mass medium," he said, adding that it would take another five to 10 years for the country to reach that stage.
But it had acquired a critical mass to help advertising and retailing, DeRose said.
Sabeer Bhatia, General Manager at Microsoft Corp and founder of Hotmail, a free electronic mail firm he sold to the global giant, told the seminar that portals to the Internet, ranging from desktops to the e-mail services of the kind he championed, would form key access points for consumer sales.
Hotmail, with 22 million subscribers, was adding 100,000 to its base every day, he said.
"There is nothing stopping us (Microsoft) from distributing software using the enormous market share we have," he said.
Hotmail was intending to launch targeted language and region-based services in Britain, Japan, Germany, France and Australia, he said.
Similar services were expected in 19 other languages, he said |
