The share of total video plays by mobile and tablet platforms continues to take away playing time from other devices, Ooyala reports today, as part of its Global Video Index for Q4, 2013. The mobile + tablet share of video plays reached almost 18% -- an increase of a more than ten points over the 7% reported a year earlier. The report predicts that mobile video “could make up to half of all online video consumption by 2016.”
Ooyala, the SaaS video management and analytics company, releases the aggregated numbers developed from its client base that serves 200 million viewers globally.
In an interview, Jonathan Wilner, Ooyala’s Vice President, Product, explained why he thought this stunning growth of mobile and tablet video viewing is happening now.“I think the critical reason is twofold,” he said. “It is an increase of premium content that is available. And underneath the covers it is a technological change that is happening with much better tablets and phones, much better wireless coverage that allows people to do streaming outside the home in particular.”
Wilner said he was struck that at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, “there were something on the order of 50 or 60, maybe even 100 7-inch tablets coming out of China that really were built just to do video. So if you have really low price point portable televisions that have an unlimited set of premium content as well as access to other ways to watch video, then you’ve got a reason why people are watching.”
This is the first post of two reporting on the interview with Jonathan Wilner and Ooyala's Q4 Global Video Index. The second one is entitled, Mobile Video Viewers' Spend Majority Time Watching Long-Form Content.
