Commentary
Nearly Half of Video Views Are Mobile
- by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, March 24, 2016
At the end of 2014, mobile phones accounted for 34% of video views. Those figures come from Ooyala’s just-released analysis of global video views. That 46% figure is an increase of nearly three times the mobile views since 2013.
Smartphones are driving the boon. But tablets are among the most popular mobile devices for content in the 10-30 minutes range, which means they’re often the device of choice for watching TV shows on mobile, the report found. Nonetheless, the smartphone dominates in the consumption of mobile video overall, with video views occurring on smartphones six times as often as on tablets in the fourth quarter.
The compound annual growth rate for mobile video plays since 2011 is more than 116%, which equates to a nearly 22 times rise in the share of mobile video plays in that same time period.
While new studies and data on the mobile video business are released regularly, perhaps the most important takeaway from this latest report is that brands need to be full participants in mobile video, since it is clearly where consumers are devoting so much of their attention.
The Ooyala study analyzed data from 2.2 million global users.
Wonder how many of those are the plague of 300x250 autoplay muted video on loop that is killing the mobile video space?
Interesting but Nielsen indicates that smartphone video usage, while increasing, is far from a frequent activity by most smartphone owners. In fact, Nielsen data notes that a relatively small percentage--I believe it's around 18-20%--- of smartphone owners account for something like 75% of all mobile video views. In other words, whatever avtivity is taking place is highly concentrated within a fairly small user base. The Nielsen findings are readily available on the company"s website under "reports", generally in the quarterly "Total Audience Reports.---if anyone is interested."