As has become tradition, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins published her anual “Internet trends” report a couple of days ago. As always, its a great read and you should check it out here. Digging through the slides, a couple of things jumped out to me personally:
Tablets are far from dead
Over the past few months, there’s been a slew of blog posts bemoaning the death of the tablet. Arguments basically ranged from the point that tablet hardware is too immature to the fact that most people don’t have a strong table usecase. Looking at the report though, the # of shipped tablets is clearly exploding and is trending upwards. That said, the report doesn’t break out what kinds of tablets are being shipped – we’ll have to check in with Ben Evans for that.
Print media spend is heavily over indexed
If I worked in print media, slide 15 would be giving me some serious heartburn. Compared to other channels, print is receiving a disproportionate percentage of ad spend compared to how much time consumer spend consuming print media. Obvious outcome here is that advertising dollars are going to continue to shift digital, with mobile picking up the biggest chunk. The buying spree around mobile ad networks is already signalling this shift with the clear example being Twitter buying MoPub.
Music is changing
There was a flurry of attention and armchair quarterbacking around Apple’s acquisition of Beats and slide 50 highlights how music is changing. With consumers favoring streaming over purchasing, the market opportunity for “winning” music is certainly shrinking. Couple that with streaming services being available on multiple devices and the Apple/Beats deal looks even stranger. In any case, the future will definitely be streamed.
The battle for the living room is heating up
Looks like the hotly anticipated “battle for the living room” is heating up. With the proliferation of set top boxes like the Roku and AmazonTV along with release of next gen game consoles, consumers are changing how they consume traditional TV. Coupled with “apps” like HBO Go, there are fewer reasons to avoid “cutting the cord” and abandoning traditional cable TV service. Obviously the content owners still hold the keys but as Netflix proved with House of Cards, making awesome TV as an outsider isn’t impossible.
Anyway, as always would love any thoughts or comments!