Are gaming consoles used as multimedia centers yet?

2005: The promise of consoles as multimedia.

In the past decade, consoles have progressively moved out of the bedroom to invade the living room (which means controllers have been increasingly stained by friendly alcohol instead of late night Pop Tarts).

The promise of multimedia centers was heavily hammered in PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 sales pitches. As with any gap between ambition and reality, it took a few years to concretely happen.

2010: Consoles are frequently used for purposed other than gaming.

New data from The Nielsen Company reveals that most owners of Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii consoles use them for a lot more than just video games.

Key observations:

• 7 in 10 PlayStation 3 owners watch Blu-ray (vs. only 43% of Xbox owners watching DVD)
• Xbox 360 and PS3 are commonly used to listen to music, watch online videos, and ride the Internet.

Time spent gaming vs. Time spent doing anything else.

• Only half of average net PS3 user time is spent online and offline gaming, compared to 62% of Xbox user time and 69% of Wii user time.
• 27% of average net PS3 user time is being spent on Blu-Ray watching.
• Wii users stand out with a rate of watching on-demand/streaming videos double that of Xbox/PS3 users (20%)

Users 13+ spend most time on PS3. Gender divide still exists.

Video game users 13 and older spend:

• 6.1 hours / week on PS3
• 4.9 hours / week on Xbox 360
• 1.4 hours / week on Wii

The male/female divide is smallest for the Wii and largest for the PS3.

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Comments

[Skiptastic]

It is interesting that on-demand streaming takes up so much Wii time, especially compared to PS3 and Xbox 360. Maybe it's lack of options for what else the Wii could be doing? I mean, if you're on the Wii and not playing games, you're probably streaming Netflix, whereas the other two consoles have more options when you are not playing games. Maybe that explains that stat?

I know that my 360 pretty much gets used every day, and it's 50/50 between Netflix streaming (mostly done by my brother) or video gaming (me playing random games and him playing Halo Reach).