Financial Times

Digital video is making a leap from the tablet to the television. A growing number of US homes are utilizing streaming devices, such as the Apple TV box, Google’s Chromecast and Roku, or Internet connected televisions to watch online video, according to media consultancy and research group Frank N Magid Associates.

People with connected TVs are watching nearly 12 hours of video programming each week via the Internet, according to research from video advertising company Tremor Video, and Nielsen, the media measurement company. Of that, people spend about seven hours per week watching film or TV show-length programming and about five hours watching short videos, such as five-minute clips. That compares to about 33 hours per week people spend watching traditional television.

The uptick in digital video viewing on television sets comes as more people in the US cancel their pay-television subscriptions in favor of cheaper online streaming alternatives.

[Commentary] In the past few decades, Wall Street has made finance a central feature of both the global economy and of our everyday lives -- a process often described as “financialisation”. Silicon Valley, almost contemporaneously, has done the same for digital media technologies. That process, too, has a fancy name: “mediatisation”.

With reports that Facebook is seeking to buy a drone-manufacturing company, ostensibly to connect the most remote corners of the globe, the days of blessed disconnection seem firmly behind us.

Understandably, many social critics find this troublesome, blaming technology for invading our lives. But it is a false target: mediatisation is actually financialisation in disguise. Having disrupted Madison Avenue, the likes of Google and Facebook -- armed with better data, better engineers and better databases -- will disrupt Wall Street next.

Silicon Valley companies sit on a trove of data about our most banal daily pursuits. And the kind of data that they gather will only grow more diverse, as the Faustian bargain that we first accepted in our browsers -- letting strangers monitor what we do online in exchange for nominally free services -- will be accepted in many other domains, especially as the rise of the “Internet of things” makes daily interaction with sensors, screens and other data-capturing devices unavoidable.

[Morozov is the author of ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’ and is senior editor at The New Republic]