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BEA (News - Alert) show aggregate personal consumption expenditures were up 2.9 percent, or $285 billion, between the fourth quarter of 2007 and the end of the second quarter of 2010, for example. 

Mobile device spending was up almost 17 percent since the fourth quarter of 2007. And spending on communications and multichannel video services was up by five percent. 

Americans were spending a little bit less on clothing and hotels; a lot less on foreign travel, video and audio equipment (think televisions), and furniture. The big drop came in motor vehicles and associated goods and services, like gasoline. Spending on household furnishings dropped six percent. 

Spending on international travel dropped 7.4 percent; purchases of audio and visual equipment dropped 8.4 percent; spending on motor vehicles declined 16 percent; while spending on moving, freight and storage services dropped nearly 20 percent. 

Spending on pets increased 14.4 percent. Spending for child care increased 13 percent. Healthcare spending grew 11 percent while education spending grew 13 percent. 

To be sure, some of those increases were not driven by an increase in end user demand but rather increased costs to meet current demand. 

In January 2010, research firm Centris (News - Alert) predicted growth of consumer spending on communications and multichannel video services. To some extent, the prediction of higher spending on video services was an easy call: costs tend to rise every year. 

Satellite and cable TV bills appear to be growing from levels reported earlier in 2009. Average monthly cable and satellite bills were both reported at approximately $70. Average TV service bills (which include fiber providers) were reported at over $72 monthly.

What the firm did not address directly was a negative trend in overall subscriptions. Sure, buyers are spending more. But there are fewer buyers. 

“Our past reports showed a decline and bottoming-out in consumer spending in key areas until November of last year, when growth started to return," Centris said at the time.

Wireless was the biggest component of communication services cost, with monthly spending climbing to over $93 in November 2009, according to Centris. Internet bills were over $40 per month, representing an increase since 2008.

In part, the higher spending on some products was driven by price increases. Multichannel video services, education and health care are the best examples of those types of increases. It isn't so much that demand increased, but that people could not buy the services and products without paying the higher prices.

In other cases, such as mobile devices, demand actually seems to have increased. Going into 2011, one suspects a similar trend will continue for mobile devices as well as tablet and related devices that represent a new product category. And consumers likely are shifting spending within categories, spending less on fixed -line services and more on mobile and broadband, for example. 

Just as important, consumers seem to have dramatically reduced spending in some categories, such as vehicle purchases, to maintain or increase spending in other categories. The point is that despite overall spending constraints, some categories still have grown. Wireless appears to provide an example. 

Multichannel video might provide an example of another type. Prices are up because of fairly regular pricing increases by providers. What bears watching now, though, is that some providers will have incentives to hike prices even more as the subscriber base shrinks, and as programming costs increase in new ways, such as higher or new fees paid by distributors to carry over-the-air TV networks. 

Under those circumstances, it appears we will start to get better tests of how much demand elasticity exists for "cable TV" as one alternative for satisfying multichannel video demand. 

In the past, despite relatively significant "dissatisfied" scores on opinion surveys, cable has not seen significant customer defections. These days, there are satellite and telco alternatives, Netflix and online alternatives to a greater or lesser degree. 

But multichannel video service now seems to face a growing value-price problem as well, since most consumers watch a fraction of total channels they pay for. Generally speaking, most people watch seven to 12 channels, no matter how many are available. Adding more channels, as a way of justifying cost increases, does not improve the value proposition for a consumer that already has settled on a stable pattern of watching seven to 12 channels. 

At some point, when the interests of content owners align with a sufficiently robust way of getting such content displayed easily on regular TVs, consumers will have huge incentives to switch. The problem for a video distributor always has been that each viewer only watches a relative handful of channels, but each viewer has a unique set of preferences, making a "multicast" delivery solution a rational solution. That likely will change over the next decade. 

Some might think widespread change is possible much sooner. That could happen, but similar substitutions have taken quite some time. A decade after fixed-line voice demand reached a peak, perhaps a quarter of U.S. homes now get by without a fixed voice line. It might take another decade before that is a common situation for perhaps half of all homes. 

Still, despite the generally-sour economy, the evidence suggests consumers have made a priority of their mobile and other communications and video services, compared to other spending choices.