Internet Penetration

Threats

In the last decade, the Internet that was once used by only few million people on the planet and originally designed to interconnect government laboratories in 1994 has expanded and become the Universal source of information for people at work, at home or even at school. This Communication Medium on a global level has made our world smaller and changed the way we do business or even communicate.

A study done by the Miniwatts Marketing Group has been released online showing the growth of the internet starting with 16 million users worldwide in 1995 and reaching 1966 Million by mid 2010. (a)

Today, the last statistics released by internetworldstats.com shows that 2110 Millions were using the Internet by june 2011. (a) These numbers show that the Internet is the biggest threat to Television worldwide. The United Arab Emirates is no exception with 3,777,900 internet users, as of June 2010, representing an internet penetration of 75.9 per cent.(b) That means more and more people are turning their back to television and spending more time on applications like Facebook , Twitter, Youtube or Google + etc... why ? well for 2 major reasons : Because they can: The Boston Consulting group ranked the UAE in 26th place worldwide out of a survey of 50 countries and leading the Middle East based on internet enablement, followed by expenditure, and engagement. (c) Because it is more fun to interact than sitting watching TV: There are 2 770 060 facebook users in the UAE that makes the penetration of online population 73.32 % (d). It has become obvious that people prefer to spend their time watching their family or friends daily uploaded videos, pictures or statuses and comment on it, or reading news from the pages within their interest

When we talk about the internet we should also talk about the technology that helped the internet spread even faster. I still remember when I was watching the movie "The Matrix" and Keanu Reeves moving the screens left and right with a single hand move or zooming in an out with few fingers.Only 8 years later the iphone was born using the same concept. But the bigger TV enemy was the release of the ipad in 2010 and selling 3 million in 80 days and 14 million by the end of the year. Then the IPAD2 in march 2011 and by then more than 15 million IPADs were sold. This platform especially designed for Audio visual contains Ebooks, Movies, Music , Game , Web and more. To make things even worse for Television, new tablets were released with android where you can download most of the application for free or you can simply create your own and post it online for people to download it and use it.The fact that these tablets are based on a touch screen technology has made things funnier, easier and simple to use. All these facts has made the television look a bit static if not boring.