According to data from Stocklytics.com, global consumers collectively spent nearly half a trillion dollars on digital media subscriptions and downloads in 2023, marking a substantial 13% increase compared to the previous year.

Video-on-Demand Subscriptions Lead Growth with a 20% Increase

The subscription-based model has thrived in recent years, transcending the pandemic-induced surge and solidifying its position as a lucrative revenue stream for publishers. Throughout 2023, digital media subscriptions remained a top priority for consumers, generating significantly higher profits than other revenue streams.

The Digital 2024 Global Overview Report underscores this trend, revealing that consumers worldwide allocated a staggering $498 billion towards digital media subscriptions and downloads in 2023, a substantial uptick of $59 billion from the preceding year. Notably, video games emerged as the dominant segment, contributing nearly half of the total expenditure. With consumers splurging almost $250 billion on video game subscriptions and downloads, representing a noteworthy 12% increase from 2022, the average spending per user amounted to $205.

While video games commanded a lion’s share of the subscription spending, video-on-demand services experienced the most significant growth, witnessing a remarkable 20% increase year-over-year. The average expenditure on video-on-demand subscriptions surged to $56.5 per user, contributing to a total spending of nearly $160 billion.

Regional Disparities in Digital Subscription Spending

Despite the global shift towards digital subscriptions, significant variations exist across countries in terms of consumer spending. Notably, Americans emerged as the leading spenders in this category, with the average online user investing over $850 on digital media subscriptions and downloads in 2023, double the expenditure of their British and German counterparts, and almost five times the global average.

Following closely behind, Japanese consumers exhibited robust spending habits, with an average expenditure of approximately $700 per internet user. South Korea secured the third position, with an average spending of $563 per user, outpacing several Western countries.

In Europe, countries such as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Austria showcased notable spending patterns, with average expenditures per user ranging from $403 to $447. Remarkably, 21 countries surpassed the global average expenditure per user, which stood at $176.4 in 2023.

Looking Ahead

The surge in digital media subscription spending signifies a fundamental shift in consumer behavior, with digital subscriptions becoming integral to the modern entertainment landscape. As consumers continue to embrace digital content consumption, publishers and content providers must adapt to evolving preferences and consumption patterns to capitalize on this burgeoning market.

For more detailed insights and statistics, visit: https://stocklytics.com/content/people-spent-almost-half-a-trillion-dollars-on-digital-media-subscriptions-in-2023-13-more-than-the-year-before/

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What do the upgrades mean for us and you?

While the CPU and RAM upgrades are one side of the story, the major performance boost comes in the form of the new upgraded NVMe SSDs by Samsung. One of the drawbacks of the previous servers we used was that it used Enterprise Class Hard Drives running ZFS file system for operations. While that was fine for the most part, we quickly identified that moving to a faster storage solution is necessary if we are to improve and expand our services. Nobody likes to wait around for data to load. This is why SSDs, especially NVMe SSDs are a far superior mode of storage as it has much lower access latency and extremely fast write times. This translates to tangible real-world performance improvement for you as well as us and if you have been using our services, you should definitely feel the upgrade from the new NVMe SSD based storage solution.

Now coming to the rest of the system upgrades, the monstrous Ryzen 9 5950X should allow us a lot more headroom when it comes to running services simultaneously like virtual machines, microservices and other backend operations. We can handle more data and the extra cores should allow us to offer more services in the future.

Also because of the new 10 Gigabit connections, the latency should be drastically reduced, even at times of peak load.

Mr. Sunit Nandi, Founder of Letter on the upgrade said, “We at Techno FAQ Digital Media are big computer nerds and we love computers of all shapes and sizes. That being said, we especially love using computers with a lot of power and this is exactly what you will be experiencing as well.”

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Google for India event had garnered massive interest among technology enthusiasts, as it was touted to be presided by Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google & Alphabet Inc. Expectedly, Pichai made the huge announcement that the company will be investing $10 billion (approx. Rs 75,000 crore) for Digitisation India over the next five to seven years.

“We’ll do this through a mix of equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure and ecosystem investments. This is a reflection of our confidence in the future of India and its digital economy. As we make these investments, we look forward to working alongside Prime Minister Modi and the Indian government, as well as Indian businesses of all sizes to realize our shared vision for a Digital India,” Pichai said.

Google’s investment focuses on the following four areas of Digitisation India:

Enable affordable access and information to every Indian in their own language, whether it’s Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi or any other.

Build new products and services that are deeply relevant to India’s unique needs. Empower businesses as they continue or embark on their digital transformation.

Leverage technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for social good, in areas like health, education, and agriculture. It can be noted that Google via growth equity investment fund CapitalG is supporting popular Dunzo, a 24×7 product delivery service in India.

With the massive $10 billion funds, Google will be able to help more start-ups related to fintech, AI, health, agriculture, education, and other sectors in India.

“There’s no question we are facing a diicult moment today, in India and around the world. The dual challenges to our health and to our economies have forced us to rethink how we work and how we live. But times of challenge can lead to incredible moments of innovation. 

Our goal is to ensure India not only benefits from the next wave of innovation but leads it. Working together we can ensure that our best days are still ahead, “Pichai said about the Covid-19 situation.

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Yahoo Inc, which disclosed two massive data breaches last year, said on Wednesday that about 32 million user accounts were accessed by intruders in the last two years using forged cookies.

The company said some of the latest intrusions can be connected to the “same state-sponsored actor believed to be responsible for the 2014 breach”, in which at least 500 million accounts were affected.

“Based on the investigation, we believe an unauthorized third party accessed the company’s proprietary code to learn how to forge certain cookies,” Yahoo said in its latest annual filing.

These cookies have been invalidated so they cannot be used to access user accounts, the company said.

Forged cookies allow an intruder to access a user’s account without a password.

Yahoo also said in December that data from more than 1 billion user accounts was compromised in August 2013, making it the largest breach in history.

The company said on Wednesday that it would not award Chief Executive Marissa Mayer a cash bonus for 2016, following the independent committee’s findings related to the 2014 security incident.

Mayer has also offered to forgo any 2017 annual equity award as the breaches occurred during her tenure, Yahoo said.

Last month, Verizon Communications Inc, which is in the process of buying Yahoo’s core assets, lowered its original offer by $350 million to $4.48 billion.

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Your personal data, be it your residential address, your phone number, email id, details of what you bought online, age, marital status, income and profession, is all up for sale. Most of this personal data is sold for less than a rupee per person -the cost of a chewing gum.

The shocking facts are revealed by the Economic Times while they approached companies called `data brokers’, who hawk their services on online listings and sell personal information. ET posed as a prospective buyer.

From Rs 15000 onwards, personal data of about 1 lakh people can be offered through brokerage.

Most of this personal data is sold for less than a rupee per person -the cost of a chewing gum

The lists up for sale are creative and granular. One data broker told ET that he could get lists of high net worth individuals, salaried people, credit card holders, car owners and retired women in any given vicinity.

Also Read: Did Uber steal Google’s car secrets?

From the list acquired by ET, they called a dozen people to verify the details. And to the horror of those people the data was correct. “It’s scary to say the least,“ said Hyderabad-based Rajashekar, who is among the list.

“It should be deemed as a crime. Without my permission, how can someone trade information related to me?“ said Bengaluru-based Nagaraj BK, who was appalled that details of his purchase of a gas stove on eBay.

Similarly , Bengaluru-based Shruti’s purchase of luggage on Amazon, along with her phone number, and when contacted to check if the purchase listed was accurate, Shruti was offended and scared and even wondered if her Amazon account had been breached.

Most of this data was sold by mobile service providers, agents from hospitals and banks, loan agents, car dealers to the data brokers.

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Researchers from Hiroshima University and National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan have announced the development of a terahertz (THz) transmitter capable of transmitting digital data at a rate exceeding 100 gigabits per second over a single channel using the 300-gigahertz band.

The THz band is a new and vast frequency resource expected to be used for future ultrahigh-speed wireless communications.

The research group has developed a transmitter that achieves a communication speed of 105 gigabits per second using the frequency range from 290 GHz to 315 GHz.

Also Read: Bangalore-Based HackerEarth Forays Into US, Japan Markets

This range of frequencies are currently unallocated but fall within the frequency range from 275 GHz to 450 GHz.

Last year, the group demonstrated that the speed of a wireless link in the 300-GHz band could be greatly enhanced by using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM).

This year, they showed six times higher per-channel data rate, exceeding 100 gigabits per second for the first time as an integrated-circuit-based transmitter.

At this data rate, the whole content on a DVD (digital versatile disk) can be transferred in a fraction of a second.

“This year, we developed a transmitter with 10 times higher transmission power than the previous version’s. This made the per-channel data rate above 100 Gbit per second at 300 GHz possible,” said Minoru Fujishima from Hiroshima University.

“We usually talk about wireless data rates in megabits per second or gigabits per second. But we are now approaching terabits per second using a plain simple single communication channel,” said Fujishima.

“Fibre optics realised ultrahigh-speed wired links, and wireless links have been left far behind,” he said.

“Terahertz could offer ultrahigh-speed links to satellites as well, which can only be wireless. That could, in turn, significantly boost in-flight network connection speeds, for example,” Fujishima added.

“Other possible applications include fast download from contents servers to mobile devices and ultrafast wireless links between base stations,” he added.

“Another, completely new possibility offered by terahertz wireless is high-data-rate minimum-latency communications,” said Fujishima.

“Optical fibres are made of glass and the speed of light slows down in fibres. That makes fibre optics inadequate for applications requiring real-time responses,” he said.

Article Courtesy: Business Standard

Image Credit: Pixabay

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