Mobile devices love video

Video is perfect for smartphones

Over the last several years we have seen a sharp increase in mobile web usage, that is, users accessing the web for content from cell phones, tablets and smart devices. What does this mean for you? Well, this means you need to tailor your website for ease of use on these mobile platforms, such as cell phones, tablets, e-readers and netbooks, but more importantly since these devices are so small, users are less and less inclined to read pages of content as they normally appear, this compared to their desktop counterparts.

Video is the obvious solution. Want to describe your product or service? Why not quickly get your message across with a well produced video, or a series of videos. Humans can deliver a message far more effectively than text and graphics can, and this is certainly true for mobile users.

Mobile users go to the web to find information, they visit Google and watch YouTube videos to quickly and effortlessly gain the knowledge they need. Do you have a keyword filled video up on YouTube? If not you may find out the hard way that you’re missing out on valuable free exposure that your competition may already be in on.

Reprint from Business Insider (Phones Dominate Online Video)
http://www.businessinsider.com/video-consumption-mobile-tablets-tvs-2013-11

One of the biggest challenges for advertisers trying to reach consumers on their mobile devices is the size of the mobile screens themselves.

Especially when it comes to videos, which require a viewer’s focus for long periods of time, the small screen of a smartphone can be a deterrent to people spending significant chunks of time consuming content on it.

But recent data from Ooyala, a firm that publishes and tracks online video, suggests that consumers are becoming comfortable abandoning the big screens of their desktops and laptops to watch video on tablets and smartphones. In fact, one chart from Ooyala’s Q2 Video Index report, released in September, is sort of mind-blowing.

In it, Ooyala broke down the total time people spent watching longform online video in Q2 2013 by the four types of devices it tracks worldwide: desktop, smartphone (labeled here as “mobile”), tablet, and internet-connected, “smart” TVs. The results say a lot about mobile’s viability as a video medium:

What the chart shows is that people spent more than twice as much time watching videos longer than an hour on their smartphones (21.02% of total time) than they did on their desktops (10.45%), an impressive display of people’s comfort with the smaller screens.

It also shows that that for every single range of online content, more people are watching on their cell phones than on their desktops.

For the longest kind of online content, the tablet has become the first screen, nearly tripling the amount of time people watch hour-plus video on desktop (28.56% to 10.45%).