Openwave Mobility has released the latest findings from its Mobile Video Index (MVI). This is the second edition of the MVI, a regular analysis of traffic data aggregated from over 30 mobile operators. The study found that, while YouTube remains the most popular platform for mobile video, Facebook is rapidly closing the gap in some markets—and has even overtaken YouTube in others. In most developed markets, Facebook video is now trending upward relative to YouTube, while in a number of emerging markets, Facebook video has already overtaken YouTube.
Alongside the data from live operator deployments, this edition of the MVI incorporates an independent consumer survey of mobile video user habits covering 3,000 subscribers in Western Europe. Despite larger mobile screens with higher resolutions, consumers revealed that they prefer to watch videos in SD rather than HD which can suffer from interruptions due to buffering. This goes against industry trends as most OTT video services are now offering HD content on mobile devices. Indranil Chatterjee, SVP of Products, Sales and Marketing at Openwave Mobility, said:
“The MVI also found that while video playback times on mobile are increasing, average playback buffer time remains stubbornly high at 7.2 seconds. However, subscribers will only put up with six seconds of buffering before abandoning a video in frustration. For subscribers, every second counts and consumers blame their operators—not OTTs—when they suffer a poor Quality of Experience (QoE).
Subscriber are willing to pay for a good QoE. Our study in Europe found that consumers are happy to pay an extra €7.50 ($9.15) per month for videos with less than two seconds of buffering. Operators can ill-afford to ignore the monetisation opportunities staring them in the face”.
Gorkem Yigit, lead analyst at Analysys Mason examined video monetization strategies for this edition of the MVI. Yigit added:
“Inspired by operators such as T-Mobile in the US, research shows that zero-rating and unlimited data plans significantly increase video engagement time. With the right traffic management techniques, operators can contain network costs and launch viable pricing models and deliver a differentiated QoE”.
