Preparing your videos so they can be viewed on mobile devices is all the rage these days.\u00a0 And for good reason, as people are becoming more and more detached from traditional computers.\u00a0 But what devices are actually being used to watch web video?\u00a0 Here are some statistics that shed light on the subject.<\/p>\n
These statistics come from Encoding.com, or actually Vid.ly (Vid.ly is the mobile encoding arm of their business).\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n
iOS (Apple) devices are clearly the runaway winners here, which is a bit interesting since Android devices have a (reported) larger market share.\u00a0 But what really matters is what mobile devices your viewers<\/em> are using to watch your videos<\/em> (you do track those statistics, right?).<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n I’ll use some statistics from my own video viewership to illustrate this.\u00a0 It’s also a good illustration of how your statistics<\/em> can vary from those that make all the headlines.\u00a0 So here’s a look at my video stats for the past year, for mobile devices:<\/p>\n That’s quite a disparity from Vid.ly’s numbers, huh?\u00a0 But it also teaches the big lesson here.\u00a0 You have to know what devices your audience is using before you do anything else.\u00a0 And you have to keep paying attention to these statistics because they can change fast.\u00a0 Case in point.\u00a0 Last year at this time only 8% of my videos were viewed on an iPhone.\u00a0 That’s a 30% jump in 12 months.\u00a0 Like I said, things can change fast.<\/p>\n\n