2020 Home Data Use Rose Due to Pandemic, Comscore Reports

Home data consumption slowed slightly as last year came to a close, to rates seen in the weeks leading up to COVID-19 pandemic closures, rising 18% overall in all of 2020, Comscore reported. Except for a “slight shift away from gaming consoles in favor of smart TVs in 2020, households continued to consume data in very similar ways to how they did in 2019,” said the report Friday. Data use grew across connected devices, with smart TVs, laptops, gaming consoles, smartphones, smart speakers, streaming players and tablets having strong growth from 2019. Smart TV data usage was higher every month in 2020, even before the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak in March.