28 hours a week: Indians spend 7X more time on smartphones than on TV

Indian  consumers spend as much as 28 hours a week on their smartphones, seven fold more than the time they end up spending in watching programmes on television as more users access internet on their mobile phone.

According to the Mary Meeker report, released on Wednesday night, the delivery of  entertainment, education, healthcare and marketplaces is being reimagined in India with the mobile phone emerging as the primary device for access to consumers.

In education sector, the report said education technology firm Byju’s has shown 15 per cent improvement in the quality of learning by accessing content on smartphones. In the healthcare sector, prices of laboratory tests have dropped by 50 per cent due to the aggregate inventory maintained by startups such as 1Mg and Portea. Customers made savings of around 20-30 per cent due to drug comparison on these platforms.

As far as payments are concerned, the unified payment interface (UPI) and use of Aadhaar is yielding results in areas such as the direct benefit transfer and instant money transfer schemes.

Users spend nearly half their time in watching entertainment content, while around 4 per cent of the time is invested on social networks and search engine sites such as Facebook and Google. News and media content remained low on priority at 2 per cent.

Around 4 per cent of the time is spent on online shopping from marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart.

This could potentially help Indian consumers take a gaint leap away from traditional formats as users stream content on their smartphones, aided by the massive rollout of 4G services by Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio.

Launch of Jio in India has accelerated internet adoption by bringing down data prices to 17 cents per GB of data in March, from $2.7 in September last year.

People spend just two hours on print, a primary vehicle for consumption across India for decades, as multimedia content on smartphones account for a majority of their lives. Most of the content they consume is shared on platforms such as ShareIt and WhatsApp.

According to the report, there are around 355 million internet users in India, which is second only to China. Nearly 80 per cent of the useer access internet through their phones.
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