41% of US Consumers Stream Video Content Daily

While the pandemic accelerated the migration to digitally-based activities, many of those shifts have gone from necessity to daily habits.

This, according to the latest edition of the  PYMNTS ConnectedEconomy Index (CE Index), titled “How the World Does Digital,” shows that across 11 countries, the digital transformation of consumers’ lives continues.

For example, the study of 30,000 consumers found a 4% rise in digital wallet usage in Q3 across the 11 major economies surveyed and an increase in digital activities in their daily lives.

Payments are just part of the picture — a mosaic that spans more than three dozen activities. PYMNTS found that 65% of all consumers in the 11 countries we study engaged in at least one of the 37 digital activities we track at least once a day — a slight increase from the second quarter of 2022.

Notable standouts here were in the communication and entertainment verticals. With a bit more granular insight into U.S. consumers’ behaviors, we see that streaming videos was the most widespread activity, where 41% of consumers streamed video content daily, outpacing the 35% who had been “passively” scrolling through social media and the 29% who streamed music.

And there is some evidence that engaging with content daily is outpacing the appeal of simply logging online, looking for things to buy, and clicking our way through various checkout pages. We found seven times more consumers are engaged daily in watching videos than shopping on a marketplace.

Noteworthy slowdowns include a 4.5% reduction in grocery subscription engagement. Blame it on the great reopening, at least in part, as consumers have been returning to shopping and paying in person — in the stores, in the aisles and at the table.

And at least some consumers have been leveraging technology to actively engage with the homestead itself — using apps, for example, to monitor the home (seen in the chart below) or to digitally set, monitor and turn off home security apps. A fair number of us are still working at home, so it makes sense that we’d be using those apps: Among consumers who worked in the preceding 30 days, 44% reported working online remotely — up from 43% in Q2 2022 and a new high across several months of reports’ worth of digital transformation data. Consumers have increased their use of home monitoring systems by 4.2% over the most recent period.

Get the Report: How the World Does Digital