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Punters to spend $2.1 trillion on e-tat this year

Way more money spent on digital plumbing than what's piped through

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World+Dog will spend $2.1 trillion (£1.3 trillion) on digital information and entertainment products and services this year, and the crazy part is most of that money will be spent on connectivity.

According to market watcher Gartner, 2011 is shaping up like 2010, a year in which $2 trillion was spent by consumers on connectivity, kit and content.

Of that, over $1.2 trillion - 62 per cent of the total - was spent on "access and usage services" - essentially, broadband and mobile phone fees, though the figure also includes pay TV subscriptions and online gaming dues.

That muddies the content-pipeline divide slightly, but it's still clear the lion's share of consumer spending goes that it is not what goes into the pipe that makes the most money, it is controlling the plumbing.

Hardware accounted for less than half that figure: $560 billion, or 28 per cent of the total. All other forms of content - games, software, e-books, music, movies, mobile apps etc - amounted to $200 billion (ten per cent).

Total spending will reach $2.8 trillion in 2015, Gartner forecast. ®

Explanation

"it's not what goes into the pipe that makes the most money, it's controlling the plumbing."

That explains why what comes out of the pipe is indistinguishable from Sewage, then?

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raising raw sewage prices

definitely, raw sewage has a higher value - at least you can make bio gas from it...

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not to worry, hand wringers

soon the cost of access and data will be raised to take care of this gross oversight. Soon it will cost more to access data than they spent on hardware.

Happy now? be careful what ya wish for.

or as the troll, "Problem?"

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Is there any historical data for comparison purposes?

Do Gartner have any inflation-adjusted numbers to compare spending to eg 15 years ago, when the equivalent services were something like magazine subscriptions and video/game rental clubs?

I'd be intrigued to see how it compares. At a guess the total expenditure per head would be much lower due if nothing else to information bottlenecks and the pain in the ass factor involved with going to the rental shop and having to deal with physical media.

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