In the game of chess, the Queen is the most valuable player, able to move any number of squares vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. In the world of digital content, content is said to be the King; it educates people so that they know, like, and trust you well enough to do business with you. But great content doesn’t distribute itself. Content needs vehicles for people to pass it along, discuss its merits, argue over its controversies, blog it, mash it, tweet it, and even scrape it.
And so this begs the question: If Content Is King, Then What’s Queen? Well according to Google, Multiscreen is the Queen. Then comes the question: What is multiscreen? The “one size fits all approach” that comes with a combination of phones, tablets, computer and TVs to consume digital content defines multiscreen.
New research out from Google, working with market analysts Ipsos and Sterling Brands, puts some hard numbers behind the often-noticed trend of how people in the U.S. are using this combination of multiscreens to view digital content.
According to their study, our average time spent online per transaction is spread across these four devices as 17 minutes on smartphones, 30 minutes on tablets, 39 minutes on PCs and 43 minutes watching TV. Although a lot of attention is being focused on smartphones and apps, this device is not only the smallest screen in our world, it’s also used for the shortest bursts.
But, while smartphones may have the shortest sessions, they are the most-used when it comes to on-boarding to a digital experience — or sequential device usage, as Google calls it. The research found that a majority of online tasks get initiated on a Smartphone while being continued on another device — perhaps with a larger screen for easier use.
That effectively means that while your total content experience perhaps doesn’t need to be designed for a smartphone experience, at least the initial part of it should be, and that part should be integrated with how that content might be used on other devices — so, for example, watching a film first on a phone and then finishing it on a TV, or starting a shopping experience on a phone and finishing it on a PC.
With the smartphones leading the market, competitors have to make sure that they have a role to play across all of the screens. Even though the mobility industry is already at its peak, there still might be many more challenges to face.
Source: Techcrunch