It’s official: the Internet is changing our world

And that, folks, is the bottom line from the number crunchers at Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, which yesterday published its International Communications Market report.

No surprises, then. But what does strike you are some of the numbers in the report, which covers television, radion, telecoms and wireless industries in the United Kingdom, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United States.

• China leads the world in viewing music videos and TV over broadband, with 76% of broadband users watching downloaded or streamed video and 70% watching TV.
• Broadband usage varies inversely with TV viewing in every country surveyed—so as broadband usage goes up, TV watching goes down.
• The Internet now attracts 10% of all advertising spend in the UK, more than in any other country.
• Average television revenue per head in the US is £253. The UK comes second in the countries surveyed at £164.

This is something that Michael Grade will have to consider in his new role as chairman of UK's largest commercial television station, ITV. The company is struggling with falling ad revenues, caused largely by falling viewer numbers. A recent report in the FT noted that the Internet juggernaut that is Google is likely to overtake ad revenues at ITV by the end of next year.

Meanwhile, ITV has developed a fairly disastrous record of new media investments in the past several years. Its early foray into digital television, launched as onDigital in 1998 and rebranded as ITV Digital in 2001, saw the company spending £315 million on Premier League football broadcasting rights to show games exclusively on ITV Digital, only to have to shut the channel down in the middle of the 2002 season after a host of problems ranging from technical issues with the quality of the digital signal, to set top box supply chains, to managing the subscriber base.

Online, the company has also faced some hiccups. At the beginning of November, a survey from online polling site YouGov noted that Friends Reunited, the social networking site that ITV bought for around £120 million in 2005, has been one of the worst brand performers in the last year, losing ‘buzz’ among Internet users. What could have been a major coup for a broadcaster, along the lines of the generally applauded purchase of MySpace by News Corp., has become a bit of a dud.