The mobile phone, or third screen as they call it, continues to break boundaries in the content people are ingesting. Of course, the advent of the iPhone layed the ground for a turning point in the industry to treat your mobile device as more than a pure utility machine and into a sort of lifestyle device.
This turning point has opened the doors to a much more “mobile involved” customer, increasing incidence of nearly every phone behavior – with the notable exception of talking – but a particularly large increase in the use of mobile video. At 28%, iPhone users are 3.5 times more likely to use mobile video and TV than non-iPhone users according to GfK study.
There are three factors coming from the market that drive this adoption:
Better phones
The iPhone created an entire new category of phone – one that jargon is beginning to call smartphone plus. The screens are bigger and better, allowing for a vast improvement in video quality, and they are designed with an ease of use in mind that transforms the way we think about our phones.
Better networks
Most major carriers have implemented 3G across their network, which has sent download and upload speeds skyrocketing at near broadband speeds. The normal-speed internet surfing from your mobile has unlocked a lot of the potential for the phones to truly become the “third screen,” making video content simply a click away.
Better content
Here the iPhone had a triple role: 1. Allowing users to view and download the content they could download to their computers, be it podcasts, episodes or full movies, on their phones. Often in the Kress household, this means scrambling to download movies before you’re stuck on a plane for a number of hours. 2. Pulling in YouTube content from the start in an app that allows the iPhone user to watch any video on the site. All of those halarious clips that we talk about with friends became immediately available from our mobile phones. 3. The iPhone helped make another cultural shift when they opened the iPhone app store to third-party developers. This created a marketplace for people to customize their phone experience, with video being one of the obvious first choices. Joost was one of the first in the game, bringing its streaming content directly the iPhone in an app.
The mobile video craze isn’t limited to viewing content either. As phone cameras continue to improve and the software behind them meets customer demand, we are seeing more and more videos taken with mobile phones and uploaded on the spot to the video sharing site of your choice. We expect that consumer generated content, not typical video content, will begin much of the growth of mobile video.
The service Qik allows users to stream video content from directly from their phones to its site, sharing every step and experience immediately with family and friends. In the screenshot below, a Googler is streaming video from the Google I/O developer conference.
We expect to see much more from mobile video in the coming years, especially as the marketplace continues to adopt the large, touchscreen “smartphone plus” phones. Keep on a lookout for opportunities for you brands to get involved on the ground level of this growing space.
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