How many forms of entertainment have moved to the big online? Let’s see: music, videos, television, conversations, jokes… and the list could go on seemingly forever. People love to be entertained, and most of them love to keep their entertainment at their fingertips-or in their pockets. In short, they use their smartphones and the internet to have fun wherever they are.
Online entertainment has seen a boom in the last few years. Let’s see which of its forms have grown the most in 2015.
Social media
Does it count?
Considering the sheer amount of cat pictures and videos shared a day, I think it does. If at first social media was about keeping in touch with friends and finding like-minded people online, today it’s about party pics, cat videos and misquoted celebrities. Which is, by any means, entertainment.
Social media has accounted for about 17% of all online time in the UK, research by the IAB shows, growing almost 5% compared to the previous year.
Mobile gaming
The most used apps on smartphones today are games. Over 60% of all smartphone owners play free, “freemium” or paid games on the go, overtaking social media apps, radio, and even weather report apps. People apparently love to play on the go, which makes gaming one of the most popular forms of entertainment today. And, given that said games are almost always connected to a server, they count as online entertainment.
Mobile gambling
Mobile gambling has seen a boom in 2015. Some developers have gone mobile first, others release their new content in parallel on all platforms. The Canadian Royal Vegas Casino released over 20 new casino games last year, and most of them have also become available through its mobile interface. Besides, older Royal Vegas games have also been remade to run on mobile devices. Although Google’s Play Store is still against real money gambling, which prevents Royal Vegas and other operators from creating their native apps, players can still find their favorite games. You can use any device running any mobile OS to access the Royal Vegas mobile browser casino and play wherever you are.
Live streaming
Sharing pre-recorded videos, á la Vine and Snapchat, is not good enough anymore. Today you can easily stream your life live through a number of services online. And their popularity has grown a lot in 2015.
Meerkat was launched in March 2015, followed closely by Twitter’s Periscope in April. And it has started growing like crazy-it has hit its 1 millionth sign-in in just 10 days time, and it saw its 10 millionth account created by August. And it has continued to grow ever since-fast enough to possibly serve as a help line for Twitter’s dwindling shares.
