Preparing your videos so they can be viewed on mobile devices is all the rage these days. And for good reason, as people are becoming more and more detached from traditional computers. But what devices are actually being used to watch web video? Here are some statistics that shed light on the subject.
These statistics come from Encoding.com, or actually Vid.ly (Vid.ly is the mobile encoding arm of their business). Over the past 3 months they tracked 5 million video views on Vid.ly and here is what was used to watch all of those videos:
- iPhone = 62.52% of all videos
- iPad = 2.38% of all videos
- Android = 23.98% of all videos
- Blackberry = 11.12% of all videos
iOS (Apple) devices are clearly the runaway winners here, which is a bit interesting since Android devices have a (reported) larger market share. But what really matters is what mobile devices your viewers are using to watch your videos (you do track those statistics, right?).
For example, there’s not much sense in jumping through hoops to get your videos to play on a device if no one using that device is trying to watch your videos anyway. On the other hand, if a lot of people are trying to watch your videos with a certain device, you better make sure they can view them.
I’ll use some statistics from my own video viewership to illustrate this. It’s also a good illustration of how your statistics can vary from those that make all the headlines. So here’s a look at my video stats for the past year, for mobile devices:
- 38% iPhone (yes, nearly half of all videos viewed on my site(s) are viewed with an iPhone…but then again, many of my videos are available through iTunes)
- .18% Android (that’s .18%, not 18%)
- Blackberry didn’t register.
That’s quite a disparity from Vid.ly’s numbers, huh? But it also teaches the big lesson here. You have to know what devices your audience is using before you do anything else. And you have to keep paying attention to these statistics because they can change fast. Case in point. Last year at this time only 8% of my videos were viewed on an iPhone. That’s a 30% jump in 12 months. Like I said, things can change fast.
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