Today in Barcelona at this years 2013 Mobile World Congress, ROVI released a study clarifying what most of us have been wondering: what actually is being watched on mobile phones and where we might be headed to as a business model is concerned to what we will watch on our seemingly attached devices.
The report was very interesting it sighted:
- Base size – 27,000 viewers in the U.S. and Europe
- In the United States, 66 percent of tablet owners stream video 2 to 3 times a week, or more.
- Beating that number is Italy (73 percent) and Spain (71 percent).
- How long are those people watching?
- 66% U.K. residents watch the longest on their tablets at 30 minutes, 62% U.S. were close behind, watching for an average of 30 minutes too.
- Rovi then looked at what type of content viewers in various countries are watching on their tablets.
- U.K. lean toward TV shows (33 percent of tablet users),
- U.S. and Germany prefer movies (35 percent and 30 percent).
- No matter the country, cell phone users were more likely to watch user-generated content (UGC).
- Italy, 47 percent of cell phone users said they watched more UGC than any other type of video.
- Live video: nearly half of respondents in the U.S. and the U.K. (49 percent and 49.5 percent) streamed a live event to a mobile device. Of the surveyed countries, Italy and Spain showed the highest viewership of live mobile video (63 percent and 59 percent).
The question now: are we going back to using video as a form of communication versus entertainment on mobile phones?
User Generated Content – UGC is really all about showing what we’re doing versus story telling. Consequently, it’s really an enhancement to how we already use a ‘phone.’
It is also a signal as to where possibly the phone is going as a tool in communication – true video phones.
Taking this study a bit further in how the phone is being used and interacted with, the ROVI study really points out how we are shifting in our societal and cultural response to personal interactions.
So really is the phone the actual vehicle for new “movie’ viewer modeling? From these numbers and cultural usage it may not.
What is certainly key is the use of a larger format tablet for longer form, quality produced media and entertainment. From this report the phone is being pointed out to be a one-to-one, personal device, and the tablet is perhaps becoming more of a ‘community’ device – i.e. more than one person can comfortably watch a video on a tablet, in fact it can also stream out to a larger screen too.
More on this over the next few days. Comments?
