THROUGHOUT this year, I’ve noticed I’ve been consuming more and more video content. I have quite an extensible subscription list on my YouTube account. My subscriptions range from tutorial channels to gadget reviews to more geeky stuff like comics and movies. And as Instagram’s Stories grow ever more popular in the collective online community, video content is gaining real traction. There’s enough traction with video that original film and serial content is being made exclusively for YouTube.
The more interesting part of the equation here is how and where consumers watch video content. According to a report by Cisco published in 2017, "mobile video traffic accounted for 60 percent of total mobile data traffic in 2016." I won’t be surprised if that figure has already climbed up since then. Let’s pause for a moment here and remind ourselves again that more than half of mobile data traffic is video.
Video. Mobile. First, the kind of media content. Second, how and where it’s consumed.
And this brings me to OpenSignal’s recent report on the stat of mobile video published just last month.
There are four key highlights from this report:
* Many countries provide a Very Good video experience
* European countries top our mobile video chart
* The fastest country doesn't offer the best mobile video quality
* The relationship between speed and video experience is complicated
So where are we, the Philippines, compared to everyone else in the planet? Right there at the bottom.
I’m still putting everything together in this report and digesting everything to find out how this affects us all and our video content consumption habits. This is still just an introduction to the report that OpenSignal has published. Next week, I’ll have more thoughts to share about this especially on each of the highlights listed above.
My initial take here is that video consumption on mobile devices via mobile connections still has a long way to go before arriving at a place where everyone will be happy. Mobile internet speed isn’t everything. There are so many more factors that will affect how we experience watching videos while on the move.
Next week, I’ll write more about this as promised.