More Xbox Live Users Watch TV than Play Games

Xbox Live Gold members in the US are now spending an average of 84 hours per month on Xbox Live, with entertainment app usage up more than 100 percent year over year. Globally, this has led to a 30 percent increase in the total hours spent on Xbox Live around the world.


The result of this increased Xbox Live activity means that for the first time on Xbox, entertainment usage has surpassed multiplayer game usage. According to Microsoft, Xbox Live members in the US are now spending more time watching TV, listening to music, and watching movies than they are playing multi-player games. 


That's one angle about the "post-PC era." We still use PCs to work. But much of what we want to do with "computing" devices is consume content. The growing availability of devices that bring such latent demand to the surface illustrates the trend. 


That might be why Apple finally was able to break through resistance and create a new tablet market, despite well over a decade of attempts to create demand for "tablet PCs." The big change is that tablets now are viewed as content consumption platforms, not "PCs."