Adobe has released the latest version of its US Digital Video Benchmark. The quarterly report, which looks into the devices powering the online video industry, notes that mobile viewing is up 57% since Q1 2013, with mobile devices now accounting for 25% of all views.
According to the report, Adobe customers produced 35.6 billion “video starts” in Q1 2014, a 43% increase over the same period last year. Much of this growth was driven by smartphones, where viewership went up 73% year-over-year. In Q1 2014, more than 13% of all video starts came from smartphones.
While smartphones and tablets (which made up 12% of all video starts in Q1 2014) are quickly turning online video into a mobile industry, Adobe’s data found gaming consoles and over-the-top (OTT) streaming devices (i.e. set-top boxes and web-to-TV devices) to be growing even faster. While gaming console and OTT devices still claim fewer than 1% of all views, the report notes a 77% quarterly increase over Q1 2013. This increase has largely been driven by digital TV streaming. The OTT market share for that particular category has risen 539% in the past year.
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With a percentage that large, it’s important to remember that OTT streaming is still very new, and thus prone to excessively large percentage increases. Still, Adobe’s main takeaway from its data is that OTT is the next great frontier of online video. Marketers can get ahead of this trend by preparing now to provide content for these devices as they continue to become more and more relevant,” explains the report.
The entire Q1 2014 US Digital Video Benchmark, which contains several other interesting results, can be viewed here.
