MUMBAI: Former Kagan COO Larry Gerbrandt has joined research firm Nielsen Entertainment in the US. Gerbrandt serves as Nielsen Entertainment senior VP and senior corporate Analyst. He reports to Nielsen Entertainment president and CEO Andy Wing.

Gerbrandt will utilise Nielsen Entertainment’s Actionable Entertainment Intelligence (AEI) to produce strategy-minded analyses on many of the complex questions facing entertainment executives today.This cross-section of data comes from Nielsen’s consulting and measurement businesses as well as data from sister companies Nielsen Media Research and Monitor Plus.

Among Gerbrandt’s first initiatives is the report called Benchmarking the Digital Household from Nielsen Entertainment. The report which has ben released explores a broad range of penetration benchmarks for how the American household uses media, entertainment, information technologies, and services.

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.Key trends observed from the analysis include

The American household is awash in “screens”. From TV sets to cell phones to PDAs to PCs-even portable game and music players-the modern home is an open portal to outside entertainment and information providers. Some three-quarters have a PC and a third own two or more. More than half of all homes have three or more TV sets.

A growing number of households are subscribing to both cable and satellite services-with the percentage almost doubling over the last few years.

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Around 80 per cent of US households subscribe to some combination of multi-channel programming service through cable, telco and satellite providers. At the 80 per cent mark the cable networks reach, at least from the perspective of advertisers, a national footprint that is functionally equivalent to that of the broadcast networks.

Around 34.3 per cent of all households now have broadband access-and these homes are the foundation for the next generation of media and entertainment launches.

Though video game-owning households represent only about a third of the US total, they are a fiercely technophilic segment, with some of the highest adoption rates of consumer electronics and services. These homes-with a disproportionate number of children 17 or younger-are the breeding ground for the heavy media consumers of tomorrow.

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Two key technology adoption inflection points were identified: a slow rate of growth until about 20 per cent penetration and a second rapid expansion to mass market adoption once the technology or service reached a 40 per cent
penetration.

Average movie attendance among the households surveyed has been falling over the last eight years but the greatest falloff has come in the heaviest movie-going segment-those that attend theaters more than once a month. The steepest declines have been in the DVD-owning homes and the broadband-enabled households.

It has become a truism that digital technologies penetrate faster than their analogue counterparts, in part because global manufacturing and global adoption have allowed pricing to fall faster. DVD players, launched only eight years ago, are in 78.5 per cent of households. Cell phones are in 75.9 per cent and personal computers are in 74.2 per cent of homes-with virtually all of those connected to the Internet through a combination of dial-up, cable modems and DSL connections. The most important subsegment is the one comprised by cable modems and DSL, which offer high-speed access to the Internet and define the broadband universe.

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