Household Technology Heats Up

Seventh annual Forrester survey shows jump in use of broadband, home networks, digicams.

Peter Saalfield, IDG News Service

Household use of technology will continue to grow in North America over the next five years, Forrester Research has reported after completing a survey of 68,000 people.

"The State of Consumers and Technology: Benchmark 2005" quizzed consumers on how they acquire and utilize consumer electronics, computers, and the Internet. Billed as the largest report of its kind, the Forrester survey examined planned use of products and technologies ranging from online banking to satellite television. It also included data on respondents' economic status and their attitudes toward technology-- whether they were "tech optimists" or "tech pessimists."

Forrester has been performing a similar survey for seven years, and past data was included in the report. Many of the devices and technologies that Forrester quizzed consumers on didn't exist when the surveys began.

Tech Comes Home

Forrester saw an increase in the percentage of households using broadband Internet access--from 19 percent in 2003 to 29 percent in 2004--and predicted that the number of North American broadband users will reach 71 million by the end of the decade.

Broadband was not the only area that exhibited high growth. Forrester expects the percentage of households with a home computer network to increase nearly fourfold in the next five years, to 46.5 percent. The percentage of households with digital video recorders should exhibit a similar increase, from 10 percent this year to a projected 42.7 percent in 2010, Forrester said.

The greatest increases in popularity between 2000 and 2010 will be for DVD players, camera phones, and digital cameras, the study said. The surveyed devices likely to exhibit the least growth are personal digital assistants and video game consoles, the market shares of which will grow only from 18.2 percent to 31.9 percent and from 40.9 percent to 48.8 percent, respectively.

Calling All Pessimists

Among consumers, Forrester found attitudes toward technology almost evenly split, with 49 percent of all households rated as optimists and 51 percent as pessimists. The company pointed out that marketing to pessimistic consumers--people who have little faith in or use for technology--is quite different from marketing to optimistic technophiles.

The research company also broke out tech optimists and pessimists state-by-state. Residents of Utah and Washington, D.C., considered themselves the most technology friendly, with 59 percent rated as optimists in each locale. The most tech averse-state? West Virginia, where only 39 percent of residents consider themselves technology optimists.