A recent survey from the NPD Group found that computer users are increasingly turning to their smart devices to browse the web and access Facebook. New data from FreeWheel [download page] shows that professionally-produced online video viewing is also migrating from computers to devices such as smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. In Q4 2012, non-PC/Mac devices accounted for 12% of video views, per FreeWheel’s report, triple their share from Q1, and 6 times their share from a year earlier.
12% is still a fairly nominal figure, of course, but the rapid growth rate (30% greater volume of views quarter-over-quarter) portends higher numbers in the near future. That’s likely to consume a lot of mobile bandwidth: according to Cisco, half of worldwide tablet data consumption (and 45% of smartphone data consumption) could be attributed to video streaming and communication applications (such as YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix) during Q4 2012.
The breakdown of non-PC/Mac video views still overwhelmingly favors Apple devices. During Q4, 60% of these views came from an iPhone (30%), iPad (24%), or iPod (6%). The remaining share belonged to Android (31%), Xbox (8%), PlayStation and others (~1%).
About the Data: FreeWheel served over 13.5 billion video ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) in Q4 2012 and made ad decisions for almost 15 billion video views. While the data in the report is primarily US-based activity on behalf of US-based content producers, a small percentage of the viewing occurs outside the US. The data here represents only video that is rights-managed: aggregate monetization data for professional content from FreeWheel’s customers, and does not reflect trends for user-generated content.
