Research: Mobile video taking off in Europe
September 29, 2010
comScore, a specialist in measuring the digital world, has released data from its comScore MobiLens service showing that the number of people viewing video on mobile devices has increased 66 per cent in the past year to 12.1 million mobile consumers across the EU5 countries (UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy).
The UK and Italy each boast 2.7 million mobile video consumers, up 75 per cent from July 2009 in the UK market and up 55 per cent in the Italian market. Spain is demonstrating the fastest growth, with mobile video consumption up 90 per cent in the past year to 1.7 million subscribers.
On-demand video/TV programming in particular experienced substantial growth in the past year, up 99 per cent since July 2009, with 5.2 million mobile owners across Europe viewing such content. Viewing broadcast TV programming is also on the rise, up 70 per cent to 3.5 million subscribers.
“The era of ‘video-on-the-go’ has finally arrived,” says comScore European VP Mobile, Jeremy Copp. “We’ve seen major developments throughout the mobile space – in networks, in devices and in software and applications – and now we’re seeing the result: a rapidly growing audience of consumers accessing video on their mobiles, be it broadcast, on-demand or sideloaded.”
Across the EU5 countries, two out of every three people who viewed mobile TV/video were smartphone owners. In the UK 80.2 per cent were smartphone owners to lead all EU5 countries, followed by Spain (71.7 per cent) and France (67.7 per cent).
“Smartphone owners are clearly driving the mobile video trend, an indication that more growth is on the horizon as an increasing number of smartphones hit the market,” Copp continued. “We’ve also seen that recent releases such as Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab are designed to offer an incredible video experience, and when coupled with services such as the BBC iPlayer for mobile, make this an extremely interesting sector to watch.”