There are a lot of reports out which show off various vendors’ knowledge of what is going on in video, but they all seem to underscore two key elements, more and more content is being watched on phones, and more and more of that carries adverts. Two variations on that theme came out this week from Ooyala and Viant.
The Ooyala report says that 46% of all OTT video plays in Q4 were on tablets and smartphones and that these grew 35% this year and 170% from the year before. Tablets are now a small percentage of this activity, around 14%, but it is going up, not down, which is a surprise. Most of this video is short in nature says Ooyala, and some 69% is under 10 minutes long, but that still means that over 30% is longer than 10 minutes, so there is some long form content watched in this way.
None of this is at all surprising. In the US we are seeing Mobile First TV services launched almost daily and the world is following suit, so this is bound to continue for some time to come, with some interesting regional variations.
But what might be an initial surprise is that larger screens are being used to watch longer form content over 10 minutes long, with some 74% of that being watch on a connected TV. That’s all well and good, but what these figures don’t show you is how much of this is captive to one screen that has the passwords built in, or is nomadic and the video belongs to a phone owner that is just choosing at the particular moment to watch long form content on any bigger screen that they come across. What we don’t want to fall into is the trap of assuming that this means that smart TVs all have the captive apps on them, and ignore the idea of flicking phone screens to a TV, and agree with all the naysayers who said that “watching video on a phone won’t happen.”
Ooyala says that Asia Pacific is somewhat different and that Singapore has the highest percentage of video plays on mobile devices at 55%, and Australia at 53%. Tablets play a bigger role in APAC and in the Philippines they made up 32% of all mobile video plays. Because the APAC region has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world, and less laptops, you would expect more phone viewing.
Ooyala then went on to talk about the continued growth in programmatic advertising surging quarter by quarter for the past year. Effectively it is becoming a part of daily operations for publishers and broadcasters. Ooyala says that mobile video programmatic spend will grow to $3.8 billion in 2017 from $1.14 billion in 2015 and in APAC, 79% of ad professionals said they now use programmatic ad tech for video, and 90% say they now use it for mobile.
Here we switch to the Viant advertising server report which says that advertisers spent $7.5 billion on video advertising in 2015, up 42% and that video ads accounted for 13% of all digital ad spending in 2015.
It cited a continued lack of viewability – adverts that show only partially on the screen, which has not improved in the past few years, and talks about how video ad completion rates are higher among bigger brands, and that click-through rates are now falling, as people learn to ignore the ads. The number of impressions on phones was going up astronomically, and falling on laptops, that theme again. Viant doesn’t mention if click through rates have changed on phones, but if, as we presume, click through rates are always lower on phones, then the shift to delivering more ads on phones explains the falling click throughs.
Viant’s adverts were still mostly served onto computers, but this fell from 88% to 79%, while 18% were served to smartphones and tablets, up from 11% last year. Is this because its clients specify not to server them to phone? We need to know. Viant also noticed that smart TVs and net tops, what it calls OTT devices, were on the rise and would soon account for a healthy percentage. They grew from 0.5% to 3% in one year.