Ooyala: Mobile Accounting for Half of Video Viewing

If you’re a broadcaster or media company and you haven’t made mobile video much of a priority yet, a new report from online video tech company Ooyala might change your mind.

According to the company’s second-quarter analysis of more than 3.5 billion videos from 220 million worldwide users, mobile video has passed the 50% mark in terms of all online video viewing, up 15% from 2015 and up more than 200% from 2014.

Smartphones are now host to 43% of all video views, up 10% from the second quarter of 2015, and tablets are responsible for 8% of all digital video views, up 51% year over year.

There is an important distinction to be found in the Ooyala report: smartphones and tablets are used for short-form video by a wide margin, while anything longer than 20 minutes is viewed on set-tops 92% of the time.

“The findings in the report further manifest the utmost importance of having a proper analytics solution that gives granular insight into your video business,” Belsasar Lepe, Ooyala cofounder and senior VP of products and solutions, said in a statement. “Only with analytics and the insights that they provide are premium content providers able to truly dig in and understand the complexities and nuances of things such as the profile of their specific power users, just how much their audience engages on mobile devices or how to properly combat subscriber churn. It can’t be overlooked, not anymore.”

Separately, Ooyala partnered with subscription payment services company Vindicia to survey approximately 1,000 American adults on their SVOD habits, finding that almost 75% subscribe to at least one OTT or SVOD service and that 58% access those services at least 11 hours a week.