The “Global Information Industry Center” at the University of San Diego has produced their 2009 report on how much information Americans consume and they’ve quantified to to be  1.3 trillion hours and 3.6 zettabytes (3,000,000,000 terabytes) or 34 GB per person per day on average.

The study provides some useful data on hourly usage, but the definition of “information” as defined in bytes is a bit more shaky as it is based on some arbitrary made up assumptions about compression level of gaming where there is no compression being used.  And because it’s so heavily weighted towards the assumed compressed bandwidth of gaming, it makes the consumption data shaky.

The study assumed that computer games were effectively compressible to 100 Mbps which the researchers say is 8 times higher than compressed HDTV transmissions.  But I don’t know how this number came about since computer games (even the most realistic) are not as realistic as live video due to the lack of details.  This is why even Hollywood to this day has a hard time convincing us we’re looking at live shots instead of computer graphics.  It can be argued that live video contains far more information worth representing in the compressed format than computer renderings.  Uncompressed Blu-Ray 1080P video is the same as 1080P gaming which works out to about 3000 Mbps, and 1080i video is 1500 Mbps uncompressed.  Compression is an arbitrary number because we can choose any level of compression level we want depending on how data we are willing to discard.

Actual 1920×1080 resolution gaming requires 3000 Mbps of data going from the video card to the display and at no time is it ever compressed.  If it’s an online game, we use approximately 100 Kbps (counting both directions) to transmit real-time positioning data while video is rendered locally.  If we wanted to render the video remotely at some centralized data center, the typical online game can be compressed to the same amount as regular HDTV or possibly even less due to the lack of real-life details.

But the study isn’t talking about Internet communications; it’s talking about compressed data consumption and it’s pinning an arbitrary compression level on games where no compression is used in practice.  Furthermore, are we actually “consuming” the data on a video screen?  Even as we intensely stare at a high resolution display, is our brain processing all 2 million pixels we encounter 60 times per second?  Or are we just fixated to the interesting part of the screen and processing the important events?  I’m not a brain scientist, but I would assume that the latter would probably be the answer.

I’m not knocking the entire report as it contains some useful data and analysis, but I’m not entirely sure what to make of the report.  As with all statistics, we need to factor in the assumptions.