Nokia: UGC to account for 25% of entertainment

According to Nokia, within five years time as much as a quarter of all entertainment will derive from consumers' peer circles instead of traditional media producers. Basing its predictions on a Nokia-commissioned study titled "A Glimpse of the Next Episode," conducted by market research firm The Future Laboratory, the handset giant anticipates that "circular entertainment"--i.e. media created, edited and shared within a consumer's own peer group--will be driven by four key trends: Immersive Living (lifestyles blurring the lines between on- and off-line existence), Geek Culture, G Tech (described as "an existing social force in Asia that will change the way entertainment will look…it is about the feminization of technology that is currently underway") and Localism (consumers taking pride in the homegrown).

Nokia and The Future Laboratory surveyed 9,000 consumers in researching "A Glimpse of the Next Episode." Among the key findings:

• 23 percent buy movies in digital format
• 35 percent buy music on MP3 files
• 25 percent buy music on mobile devices
• 39 percent watch TV on the Internet
• 23 percent watch TV on mobile devices
• 46 percent regularly use IM, 37 percent on a mobile device
• 29 percent regularly blog
• 28 percent regularly access social networking sites
• 22 percent connect using technologies such as Skype
• 17 percent take part in Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
• 17 percent upload to the internet from a mobile device

"The trends we are seeing show us that people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups--a form of collaborative social media," said Nokia vice president of multimedia Mark Selby in a prepared statement. "We think it will work something like this: Someone shares video footage they shot on their mobile device from a night out with a friend, that friend takes that footage and adds an MP3 file--the soundtrack of the evening--then passes it to another friend. That friend edits the footage by adding some photographs and passes it on to another friend and so on. The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group's entertainment."

For more on Nokia's circular entertainment forecast:
- read this release [1]

Related articles:
Forecast: UGC [2] to generate $5.7 billion by 2012
Getting to know UGC [3]
Social networking [4] and UGC--will it live up to projections?