Europe UK : Orange announced the launch of the Orange Digital Media Index, a detailed report examining trends in Orange customers’ consumption of digital media. The Index looks at usage patterns across the full range of Orange’s entertainment and communications services, including home broadband, text and picture messaging, and mobile internet.

The first Digital Media Index reveals that mobile internet services are playing an increasingly important role in customers’ lives – mobile gaming, the Live World Cup Cricket channel and movie trailers for the year’s blockbusters have all proved extremely popular.

Key findings from the Digital Media Index include:

• The “Atari generation” is the major force behind mobile gaming, with almost a quarter of a million mobile games downloaded each month
• Live sporting events will play a key part in the success of mobile TV, with the Live Cricket World Cup taking the largest audience share for the quarter
• Annual events such as the BAFTA’s and Oscar season lead to a huge upswing in movie clips access
• Texting is more popular than ever with over 870 million messages sent in Q1 by Orange customers alone
• Orange World, the mobile internet portal, now attracts more than 2m unique visitors each month – more than half the number of monthly visitors to Orange.co.uk, one of the country’s most popular websites

Matthew Kirk, Director of Portals for Orange, said: “The Orange Digital Media Index provides a fascinating insight into the role of technology in twenty-first century life. We now use technology and multimedia services to consume, buy, gain knowledge, stay in touch and generally make our lives richer and easier. We believe this is the just beginning and as we deliver smarter pricing and even better services, we expect to see growing numbers of people using the mobile and internet to do more things in more places than ever before.”