UK Internet shoppers are spending up to 50 per cent more on electrical goods than they would on the High Street, according to new research.

A new study by market research firm GFK found that the average price spent on like-for-like products was higher on the Internet because tech-savvy surfers were shelling out for higher specified products.

For example, the research firm found that average price of an LCD TV bought on the Internet was a hefty £867 – 32 per cent higher than the average High Street spend of £657.

In the massively lucrative consumer durables market – worth an eye-watering $42bn – the Internet has doubled its share from four to eight per cent of overall sales, giving online shops a whopping £3.36bn share.

Not surprisingly, popular consumer products like hard drives and mp3 players have been big movers, but GFK also noted that consumers are increasingly shelling out for more diverse products online, such as bread makers and dishwashers.

James Randall, commercial director at GFK, said: “Over the last 12 months the internet fulfilled its hype for retailing. What is particularly interesting is how consumers’ buying behaviour differs on the internet. It is not surprising that internet shoppers are more technically savvy than the norm.”

“However, what is interesting is that, as they are early adopters, when they buy products they usually spend more money on the internet as they buy the latest, higher specification items,” he added.

GFK

Now there’s been much talk of the death of traditional linear TV and it appears that the demise of the traditional broadcasters in the UK is taking a little longer than some expected. Perhaps hidden behind the excitement of Google buying YouTube and the UK start of two further channels on the Freeview platform; Five US and Five Life is a channel that could be the harbinger of how TV channels in the future will launch.

So what is 18 Doughty Street? Well it’s both the name of a new Internet TV channel and the address where it’s produced. It’s target audience appears to be a group of right leaning Political Anoraks and the content is unfettered by the UK broadcasting regulator OFCOMs requirement for broadcasters to show political even-handedness across the left/right spectrum. To be fair it is upfront about it’s partiality, declaiming others for not coming quite so clean about what it sees as their undeclared biases.

One of the guiding lights and also taking presenting duties is Iain Dale, Ian is well known both for standing as an unsuccessful Conservative candidate at the last UK general election and as one of the bloggers who exposed details of Labour’s deputy leader John Prescott’s extra marital affairs on his blog.

The channel is starting with a four hour per night Monday to Thursday schedule, the programmes, once broadcast are available for download to the politically fixated.

The relatively innocuous content is lodged somewhere between the fashionable haphazard Zeitgeist of UGC (User generated Content) and the bland professionalism of the big broadcasters, time will tell if there’s a hole there that this will fill.

It might be that this sort of channel will appeal to viewers who shy away from subscribing to video Podcasts via iTunes but it again exposes the need for a simple method of getting TV type content from the home PC to the traditional TV.

There’s no guarantee that future examples will be quite so innocuous and this new channel exposes the issues around how Europe’s TV without frontiers may need to be revised to include what is effectively TV delivered by the Internet.