A study by Uswitch analysed how much time Brits are spending in front of a screen and what effects this can have on wellbeing.

Brits have been in front of a screen now more than ever, whether it’s as a form of entertainment or simply the work from home lifestyle many are now used to. But how much time do we really spend in front of a screen?

UK Adults are spending over half of every day in front of a screen .

The study reveals that the UK is spending 386 minutes (6.4 hours) using the internet every day, this is almost equivalent to an average shift at work.

Coming in second is watching TV, the study reveals that Brits spend up to 4 hours a day watching television. Watching television is part of a daily routine but many would never consider just how much time they actually spend on the sofa.

In addition, scrolling on social media and listening to music take up a lot of daily average screen time. The research shows that Brits spend an additional 109 minutes on social media and 75 minutes listening to music per day.

While Brits might not think twice about how much screen time they consume, the study reveals that in total, UK adults are spending 51 per cent of their time in front of a screen every year. Which means that for most adults the only time they’re not in front of a screen is when they’re asleep.

Brits watch nearly 1,000 hours of TV every year . . The study reveals that Brits are spending up to 21 hours a week watching TV, which is equivalent to 997 hours a year. Despite the growth in streaming services, TV still holds its weight against the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

SVoD services came in second place with users watching 398 hours per year. This is equivalent to streaming for a solid 16 days without stopping.

Social media platform, YouTube, takes third place. Broadcast live TV and DVD have seen a decline over the past few years, YouTube has seen a surge in popularity which is why it makes the top three; Brits can spend up to 269 hours pear year on the app.

. Gen-Z are spending up to 9 hours a day in front of a screen

With the summer break here and lockdown restrictions constantly changing, many children and teenagers will spend a lot of their time at home looking for a way to entertain themselves. The study reveals that children aged between 5 – 16 spend up to 9 hours a day in front of a screen, with socia media app TikTok proving hugely popular.

In addition to spending more time on social media apps, studies revealed that the percentage of Gen-Z who watch videos every day has doubled since 2015. From 24 per cent to 56 per centamong 8-12-year-olds, and from 34 per cent to 69 per cent among 13-18-year-olds. The study reveals that kids are spending the same amount of time on the internet and watching television, which suggests that they are doing this simultaneously which could have effects on their ability to focus.

Studies show that Gen-Z is aware of how much time they spend on social media, but are unable to limit themselves. Some 44 per cent of teens say that they check for messages and notifications as soon as they wake up. Social media gives teens a sense of belonging through puberty so it’s understandable that they gravitate towards wanting to be respected and admired based on the number of likes they receive on a photo, says the study.

Catherine Hiley, mobiles expert at Uswitch commented: “We are so subconsciously immersed in our digital lives that this research really highlights how much of our time is spent in front of a screen. With over half of our free time spent on gadgets, using your devices’ screen time notifications and settings can be a good way to help set boundaries and enjoy some time away doing other activities.”

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The Epyc 2nd generation chip, manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) is arranged for a photograph during a launch event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The severity of the global chip shortage has gone up a notch over the last few weeks and it's now looking as though millions of people will be impacted.

As technology has advanced, semiconductor chips have spread from computers and cars to toothbrushes and tumble dryers — they now lurk beneath the hood of a surprising number of products.

But demand for chips is continuing to outstrip supply, and car makers are no longer the only companies feeling the pinch.

Alan Priestley, an analyst at Gartner, told CNBC that the average person on the street is bound to be impacted by the chip shortage in one form or another.

"What it will mean is they can't get something, or prices are slightly higher," Priestley said during an interview on Thursday.

South Korean tech giant Samsung said last week that the chip shortage is hitting television and appliance production, while LG admitted the shortage is a risk.

"Due to the global semiconductor shortage, we are also experiencing some effects especially around certain set products and display production," said Ben Suh, head of Samsung's investor relations, on a call with analysts.

"We are discussing with retailers and major channels about supply plans so that we are able to allocate the components to the products that have more urgency or higher priority in terms of supply."

Samsung's co-chief executive and mobile chief, Koh Dong-jin, said at a shareholder meeting in March that there's a serious imbalance in supply and demand of chips in the IT sector. At the time, the company said it might skip the launch of the next Galaxy Note smartphone.

LG said it is "closely monitoring the situation as no manufacturer can be free of the problem if it gets prolonged," according to The Financial Times. LG did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

Everyday appliances at risk

Production of low-margin processors, such as those used to weigh clothes in a washing machine or toast bread in a smart toaster, has also been hit. While most retailers are still able to get their hands on these products at the moment, they may face issues in the months ahead.

Even dog-washing businesses are suffering, according to The Washington Post. CCSI, which makes electronic dog-washing booths in the Illinois village of Garden Prairie, was recently told by its circuit board supplier that the usual chips weren't available, according to the report.

The business, which did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment, was reportedly offered a different chip, but that required the company to adjust its circuit boards, raising costs in the process.

"This particular problem affects all aspects of manufacturing, from little people to big conglomerates," President Russell Caldwell reportedly said. "Literally we have corn fields around us . there's not a lot here."

Many companies — particularly those in China who have been hit by sanctions — are boosting their stockpiles of in-demand chips to try to ride out the storm, but that's making chips even harder to get hold of for other firms.

Auto industry remains worst hit

The automotive sector, which relies on chips for everything from the computer management of engines to driver assistance systems, is still the hardest hit. Companies like Ford, Volkswagen and Jaguar Land Rover have shut down factories, laid off workers and slashed vehicle production.

Stellantis, the world's fourth biggest car maker, said on Wednesday that the chip shortage had gotten worse in the last quarter. Richard Palmer, the chief financial officer of the firm that was created through the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot maker PSA, warned the disruption could last into 2022.

Some carmakers are now leaving out high-end features as a result of the chip shortage...

By Solomon Assefa and Marina Rakhlin

Today, IBM along with a dozen other enterprises, including Apple, Boeing, Cargill, Dow, PepsiCo, Verizon and others became the inaugural members of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC). Together our mission is to accelerate the large-scale, real-world implementation of solutions to address the threat of climate change.

IBM’s membership in the MCSC is yet another milestone in our commitment to lead with solutions that mitigate and adapt to climate change. Starting with the creation of the first cross-industry guidelines for voluntary corporate environmental reporting back in the early 1990s to our support for the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 to our most recent membership on the Climate Leadership Council, our dedication to environmental sustainability has been unwavering for decades.

This past year IBM Research launched a new global initiative called the Future of Climate, with researchers across our worldwide labs focused on developing and demonstrating innovations to enable sustainable hybrid cloud, climate-smart AI platforms, and accelerated materials discovery for carbon capture. Read more about the overall program as part of our Science and Technology Outlook 2021, which highlights our approach to accelerating discovery to address pressing challenges like the climate crisis.

As the leading hybrid cloud platform company, IBM is uniquely positioned to proactively address the challenge that datacenter energy consumption is expected to grow to more than 10% of the world’s electricity use by 2030. A sustainable hybrid cloud solution is one that enables clients to measure, visualize, and optimize the carbon footprint of their workloads running in the hybrid cloud. IBM Research is innovating on technologies that enable coordinated placement of containers to optimize energy efficiency and dynamic scheduling based on the availability of renewable energy. In 2020 IBM received 3,000 patents in the cloud area alone, marking our 28th year of patent leadership.

Climate-smart AI platforms are essential to enable carbon responsibility and business resiliency. As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, businesses must understand risks, anticipate impacts, and optimize operations. AI-powered platforms for carbon footprint accounting and climate-aware supply chain optimization all require innovations for accurate impact modeling and prediction. For instance, sophisticated queries of massive geospatial data reveal societal and environmental impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, showing for instance the significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions as a result of regional lockdowns in the spring of 2020. Physics-informed AI now enables us to build AI models that learn the physical laws of a system which can be directly applied to climate. In recent work, we have shown that integrating physics with neural network models can create robust, explainable models that aid in anticipating and reducing climate impacts.

We have also trained AI models on physics-based simulated data to generate high-fidelity snapshots of the climate system and build an AI surrogate model of a complex dynamical system – in essence, fast and accurate approximations of computationally-intensive simulators.

Another pressing challenge is to design materials that capture carbon dioxide (CO2) at its emission source, since continued greenhouse gas emissions exacerbate climate change. On average, it takes at least ten years to discover a new material and bring it to market, but we simply can’t wait a decade for new materials for carbon capture to tackle the climate crisis. Thankfully, we can now combine artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and hybrid cloud to accelerate discovery. By applying deep search, AI- and quantum- enriched simulation, generative models, and cloud-based AI-driven autonomous labs, we are super-charging the scientific method to accelerate the discovery of new materials, including com...

Celebrating the sustainability initiatives by the tech giants

The giant cloud players have used their scale to push forward on renewable purchasing and other sustainability initiatives.

Serverfarm backs all real actions to boost data center efficiency and to reduce GHG emissions. We’re committed to doing everything in our power to tackle climate change, including supporting commitments around carbon emissions reductions from across the industry.

In the last couple of years, a seemingly plentiful supply of renewable energy has allowed hyperscale data center operators to buy solar- and wind-generated power along with RECs (Renewable Energy Certificates) and PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements) to support environmentally friendly policies and hit aggressive zero-carbon-footprint targets.

The power capacity required by hyperscale data centers runs to terawatts and the operators have done an excellent job of defining net zero carbon policies, sourcing renewable power and directly investing in solar and wind farms to keep their data centers operating.

Purchasing electricity generated from renewables has resulted in companies such as Google and Apple securing power to match their data center energy consumption. We will let Amazon and Google work out who became the largest purchaser of renewable energy in 2020.

The hyperscalers are accomplishing some amazing sustainability-related goals. Below, we offer some extracts from sustainability reports and information on the latest initiatives by big tech companies.

“We are driving down Scope 1 and 2 emissions to near zero by the middle of this decade, focusing on our direct and indirect emissions from our facilities and datacenters through the following methods:

Zero carbon power and diesel-free generation: We are working to scale up our consumption of zero carbon energy in our campuses and datacenters. . We will shift to low-carbon standby power systems including battery storage, and low-carbon fuel such as hydrogen, building on a successful test in 2020 using hydrogen fuel cells as backup power for datacenters.

Zero carbon transport

Improving energy efficiency in data centers

. Microsoft has been supporting the EU’s efforts to develop a policy proposal on climate neutral datacenters. We also helped commission a major think tank study on datacenter energy efficiency issues for use in advocacy efforts and are helping create dedicated trade association projects in Brussels and Dublin to engage in the related policy efforts.

. Our datacenters will roll out a global initiative to train employees on company-wide and site-specific procedures to operationalize zero waste.”

Read Microsoft’s full sustainability report at this link.

IBM

IBM has committed to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. In early 2021, it announced detailed actions it is taking now and those it will take in the future to reach that lofty goal. It began with a commitment to reduce GHG emission by 65% within four years.

IBM said: “What’s most important in the fight against climate change is to actually reduce emissions. The company’s net zero goal is also accompanied by a specific, numerical target for residual emissions that are likely to remain after IBM has first done all it can across its operations to reduce.”

IBM Research has launched a Future of Climate initiative designed to accelerate the discovery of solutions to address the impacts of a changing climate.

IBM will buy 75% of the electricity it consumes by 2025 and 90% of its procured power from renewable sources by 2030. The target is based on the energy the company can actually consume, not on the purchase of unrelated, unbundled renewable energy certificates.

Importantly, IBM said “its net zero pledge also establishes near-term targets to drive accountability and progress now. It is transparent in terms of how the company calculates and reports renewable energy use.”

In January, IBM joined the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium.

In June 2020, AWS released ...

DAZN will keep on showing the Premier League in Spain until 2025.

The online sports platform has renewed their contract with the top-flight English football league for another three years, giving it the rights to 235 matches per season. Its current deal expires after the 2021/22 season.

An agreement with Movistar means matches can also be seen on television in the country.

“With the renewal of our agreement with the Premier League in Spain through 2025 we will continue to offer fans one of the world’s most prestigious sporting competitions, building on our existing successful partnerships” said Veronica Diquattro, DAZN’s chief customer and innovation officer. “We will keep on working together to offer the growing number of fans who follow the Premier League in Spain the best experience and the best content, so that they can enjoy it to the full and discover new stories first hand through the key players, on and off the field.”

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The US Federal Trade Commission is reportedly launching a probe into Amazon’s planned acquisition of MGM.

According to The Information, citing unnamed sources, the FTC has opened an in-depth investigation into the merger that could last for six months or more.

News of the possible probe follows the June appointment of Lina Khan, seen as a critic of big tech companies and Amazon in particular, as FTC chair. Amazon had asked for Khan’s recusal from cases involving it, citing comments she had previously made about Amazon being allegedly guilty of antitrust violations and calling for the company to be broken up.

US senator Elizabeth Warren recently said that FTC should carry out a thorough review of Amazon’s takeover of MGM.

Warren reportedly wrote to Khan calling for a probe that “would assess whether the acquisition could grant Amazon the incentive and ability to disadvantage Prime Video’s streaming service competitors or MGM’s production-company competitors”.

The news also comes as the Biden administration moved last week to place mergers under much greater scrutiny, bringing together multiple Federal agencies tasked with regulating competition and consumer protection.

President Joe Biden on Friday signed an executive order to promote competition via a “whole-of-government effort to promote competition in the American economy”, charging the Department of Justice and the FTC to “enforce the antitrust laws vigorously”, with tech name-checked as one of the sectors to be focused on.

The FTC responded with a statement that “the current guidelines deserve a hard look to determine whether they are overly permissive” and that it planned, with the DoJ, to “jointly launch a review of our merger guidelines with the goal of updating them to reflect a rigorous analytical approach consistent with applicable law”.

Amazon announced a US$8.5 billion deal to acquire the James Bond studio in late May, and has said that it will focus on its ‘reimagining and developing’ IP from MGM’s library.

Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ:ZM) is coming off of an epic year of triple-digit-percentage sales growth and has been catapulted into global consciousness by the COVID-19 pandemic. But now more than one year removed from the start of the global health crisis, the Zoom boom is over. Already with an enterprise value (market cap minus cash and equivalents) of $110 billion (compared to less than $20 billion at the start of 2020), Zoom stock reaching $1 trillion by 2030 -- a tenfold total return, or an average compound annual growth rate of about 26% -- might seem like a longshot.

However, Zoom is disrupting a massive global communications industry, and as a cloud software business, it has additional capabilities it could unlock that a traditional telecom business cannot. Don't write off the possibility of this stock delivering another tenfold return in the next decade.

Don't sweat the valuation -- look at what's at stake

When it comes to valuation, Zoom carries a premium price tag in all respects. Even down 34% from all-time highs reached last autumn, shares trade for 73 times trailing-12-month free cash flow and 28 times expected current year sales. In fact, not only is Zoom trading for several decades' worth of current annual revenue, it's also valued for many multiples more than total global annual spending on video conferencing services. Various estimates expect global spend on internet-based video communications to reach $50 billion or so a year, but not until 2026.

When it comes to technology leaders, it's commonplace for them to be valued multiple times higher than the global annual spending on the industry they participate in. Why? For one reason, business valuations are calculated using future expected profits, the expected rate of growth of said profits, and the degree of certainty with which they'll be generated. For example, Alphabet has a market cap of $1.68 trillion, even though global digital advertising (which is 80% of Google's total revenue) is expected to be $455 billion this year.

The point is this: Don't balk at Zoom's lofty valuation just because it's already far larger than the industry it's pioneering. Besides, consider what's up for grabs here. The telecom industry soaks up $1.5 trillion a year from businesses and consumers. If Zoom can continue to expand on its capabilities, some of this massive market could go the way of video in the next 10 years -- and just a small fraction of $1.5 trillion will move the needle in a big way.

Lots of cash now, an unimaginable amount of cash later

But can Zoom really execute on such an ambitious plan? After all, its core video conferencing service is slowing down as effects of the pandemic ease. Revenue growth is expected to be about 50% this year, which implies quite the cool-off from the 191% growth rate notched in the first quarter of fiscal 2022.

But remember that Zoom doesn't fit within the definitional confines of a communications service. This is a cloud-based software service, which means it has flexibility -- like how it recently announced the acquisition of a real-time machine-based translation start-up called Kites GmbH. It's also been promoting its Zoom Phone service for businesses to provide a more flexible telephone system than what's offered by legacy telecoms. Zoom has an incredible $4.69 billion in cash and equivalents and zero debt on balance; compare that to net debt positions most telecom operations have these days. Put another way, Zoom is a nimble software technologist in the driver's seat of disrupting how people stay in touch.

This trend isn't going to suddenly reverse, either. Zoom generates massive amounts of cash every quarter. Its free cash flow profit margin was 47% in Q1, good for $454 million in extra cash over and above what it needed in its operations. That tiny real-time translation start-up acquisition could be just the beginning if and when Zoom decides to start flexing its muscles.

Between a growing video conferencing market, a ...

President Biden's new executive order "on Promoting Competition in the American Economy,on Promoting Competition in the American Economy," talks a big game on promoting competition across the U.S. For the tech portions of the document, it's not clear how much walk there is to follow up the talk — but already, advocates are hopeful that it means a more free and open internet.

The order, which Biden signed Friday, basically says the federal government will make curtailing monopolistic and unfair business practices a priority from here on out. The document covers a wide swath of economic issues, from international trade to agricultural workers' rights to prescription drug costs. Antitrust experts agree that it sends a clear signal to big business: The times, they are a-changin'.

"What they said today was 'we're going to use every single power within the executive branch to deal with concentration of power in powerful corporations'," says Barry Lynn, an antitrust expert and executive director of the Open Markets Institute. "This was a statement of principle, a statement of intent."

Several sections in the order relate to powerful tech companies. This is no surprise: Breaking up big tech has been a hot topic at the FTCFTC, in CongressCongress, and in federal and state departments of justicefederal and state departments of justice for some years. But the executive order goes far beyond the scope of those investigations. It wants internet service providers to allow for more consumer choice and pricing transparency. It wants the FCC to restore net neutrality; it wants new rules governing surveillance and data collection by internet companies; it throws the president's weight behind the right to repair movementright to repair movement.

And, yes, it says the government will look at unfair business practices among internet giants, like privileging their own products in online marketplaces or making competition-killing mergers — which could be reversed.

But how big of an impact will this order actually have on the internet? Executive orders are directives a president makes to executive departments (like the Department of Transportation or Agriculture), independent agencies (like the FCC or the FTC), and other independent government bodies (like the Department of Justice and Congress). The tech provisions mostly fall under the purview of independent agencies and the Department of Justice, whom Biden can't force to do anything.

Still, there's a good chance — especially on provisions like pursuing antitrust cases, and writing and enforcing net neutrality and privacy laws — that what the executive order demands will come to fruition.

Hours after the White House released the executive order fact sheet, the FTC published the responsethe response of newly installed chair Lina Khan. It says the department will be reviewing merger guidelines, and potentially revising them, if they are determined to be"overly permissive." This is in step with the order's "policy of greater scrutiny of mergers, especially by dominant internet platforms." Of particular concern: "The acquisition of nascent competitors, serial mergers, the accumulation of data, competition by 'free' products, and the effect on user privacy."

The FTC had already begun work on new data privacy rules, which would strengthen its ability for enforcement actions against tech companies that collect users' personal information. Berkeley Law professor James Dempsey says the fact that the executive order referred to data collection as surveillance was "significant."

"The president is saying, 'yes, do what you were going to do,'"Dempsey said, referring to the FTC rules on data collection. "What's notable here is the rhetorical emphasis on surveillance and the accumulation of data — which is really not the way that executive branch officials previously talked about tech company data practices."

The executive order also signals that strong action is coming down the pike on internet providers. It...

The Tokyo Olympics will be held without fans due to a rise in Covid-19 infections in the city, Japanese government officials announced today. Short of another postponement of the games, that’s just about the worst news possible for TV networks hoping the Olympics would buck the trend of weakened sports ratings during the pandemic.

Japan and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) agreed last month to allow 50% fan capacity at the games, which are set to run from July 23 to Aug. 8. But rising cases forced the government yesterday to issue a fourth state of emergency in Tokyo, putting the question of fans back on the table. Today they concluded to ban spectators entirely.

It’s a jarring development for a sports world that has slowly returned to a semblance of normalcy, with packed crowds at events like the National Basketball Association Finals and European soccer championships. Like professional sports, many Olympic events feed off crowd energy. No fans likely means an underwhelming presentation for viewers at home.

“The experience is going to be sterile,” Rick Burton, a professor of sport management at Syracuse University and the former chief marketing officer of the US Olympic Committee for the 2008 Beijing games, told Quartz last month. “The sponsors are going to be thinking the ratings will be down. They’re worried they’re not going to get their money’s worth.”

TV viewers don’t like sports without fans

Sponsors have right to be worried. TV ratings for virtually all major sports leagues were down during the pandemic, even as other at-home entertainment options like streaming and gaming skyrocketed with consumers stuck inside. Ratings for last year’s NBA Finals, which were held in a fan-less bubble, were down 50% from the previous year. Experts attributed those declines at least in part to the lack of fans in the stands. Sports just aren’t the same to watch on TV when there’s no one there to watch them in person.

Two thirds of US sports fans said watching sports during the pandemic was “less enjoyable” than before, according to Kantar, a research firm that measures consumer enthusiasm. ”[The Olympics] could be a little bit less engaging, a little bit less fulfilling for the viewer,” Ryan McConnell, Kantar’s senior vice president for consulting, told Quartz last month.

A less fulfilling viewer experience will almost certainly translate to a less watched one. Moments like Usain Bolt playing to the crowd and taking a victory lap after his historic 100 meter win at the 2012 London games will be absent.

In fact, there is some research that shows crowd noise positively impacts athletic performance, and can even increase effort levels. Racing events in track, swimming, and rowing could yield slower times without that extra boost from the crowd. On the other hand, perhaps events like gymnastics will post higher scores without the added pressure of spectators assessing every move.

That the Olympics are happening at all is a win for media companies like NBCUniversal, which owns the exclusive rights to broadcast the games in the US. The company has already sold more than $1.2 billion worth of ads, beating its total from the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro. But it’s unclear how many TV viewers will actually be exposed to those ads, now that the Olympics won’t have fans in attendance.