Smartphone Video Viewing Up 86%

Driven by short sports clips and major appetites for TV content, mobile devices accounted for 20% of video streaming in Q4 2013, according to Adobe's analysis of over 22.5 billion video starts. Smartphones outpaced tablets in video growth and in absolute use for the first time. Video streaming to handhelds was up 86% year-over-year, accounting for 12.8% of all digital video consumption. Tablet streaming was up only 23% to make up 9.2% of all digital streams. Sports clips are big drivers for mobile, with this content type up 640% since a year ago. On big event sports days, Adobe says it sees over a quarter of video going to devices.

TV Everywhere is experiencing marked growth, from 225.5 million streams measured by Adobe to 574.2 million year-over-year. And devices are king in this category, with 73% of the streams going to devices, and only 22% to PCs. TV is one genre where tablets dominate, now overtaking smartphones with 42% of views. Both game consoles (3%) and set-top boxes (2%) still represent very minor routes to video consumption. And sports, again, is a key driver that is responsible for 37% of authenticated TV viewing. Of course, the high visibility of ESPN Everywhere and mobile viewings of high-profile events like March Madness may well be central to these metrics. Only 28% of TV Everywhere requests are for TV shows. But with tablets, a dominant force in TV Everywhere, it is not surprising that iOS then is seeing nearly half of plays. In fact, iOS viewers watch twice as much TV Everywhere as PC viewers, and they are viewing over 10 videos per person per month.

Facebook is the chief of video social sharing, according to Adobe measurements. Although the majority of videos are viewed direct from a branded media site, 80.6% of the 6% of starts from video shares come from Facebook.

The emergence of 4G networks, their increased speed and responsiveness clearly have something to do with the outside growth rates in smartphone video viewing. The dominance of devices in TV Everywhere authenticated viewing is a testament to how quickly people are looking upon smartphones and tablets as portable TVs. More so than the PC, where the desktop setting required the same posture as work mode, mobile invites us to lean in or lean back as needed. -MediaPost

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One in Ten Videos Are Played on Mobile/Tablets [study]

Ooyala released its Q1 Video Index this week, with more stunning statistics not only about the growth of video online viewing but particularly about the fact that viewing is happening ever more so on tablets and smartphones.

In some places around the world an even bigger trend might be the amount of live video streaming that is happening on devices.

Let’s start with this: The share of tablet and mobile video grew 19% in just the first Q1 2013. Mobile and tablet video now account for more than 10% of all online video plays, the Ooyala study says. In the first quarter, last year, that figure was just 4%.

And here’s another creeping-up-on-you-stat:  Mobile and tablet viewers spend more than half their viewing time watching long form videos, which in this case means ten minutes or longer. Still one quarter of the time spent watching on tablets was for content that was an hour or more long.  Pretty clearly, worldwide, that tablet might as well be a TV and movie screen.  

Globally, desktop viewers watched live news, sports and special events for an average of 40 minutes per play.  On average, people streamed live video on smart TVs and gaming consoles for 45 minutes per play last quarter.

That’s nine times longer than VOD. Desktop viewers watched live video 13 times longer than VOD last quarter, tablet video viewers watched live video four times longer, and mobile audiences tuned in to live video three times longer.

Ooyala paid special attention to Pacific Rim nations for this edition of the study, because there, patterns are emerging faster, or just differently, than other places. In some places, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea, viewers watch live video 20 times longer than on-demand video, across all device types. That’s far longer than in other places around the world, where the ratio is still a mind-boggling 12 to 1, using all devices.

Other quirks: Long -form video viewing made up 45% of the total time spent with online viewing in Malaysia. And in Singapore, live viewing averages 52 minutes per session, more than anywhere else in the region.

Ooyala measures viewing habits of nearly 200 million unique viewers in 130 countries every month, so this is the view of the online video world pretty much from outer space. Still it provides a rather impressive view of the online world right now, which is changing and growing rapidly.

For the first time in the first quarter just ended, Ooyala said, that mobile (53%) and tablets (52%) beat desktop PCs (38%) in percentage of time spent watching long-form video.

 “Cross-device measurement is critical for content owners and broadcasters as they move their premium content online” said Sudhir Kaushik, director of products, insights and optimization at Ooyala,  in a press release that accompanies the study. “Our ability to collect content and advertising data from each viewer on any device at any time and then process that information into insights in real-time is what differentiates us.”-Mediapost

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