With AT&T’s recent acquisition of Time Warner finally coming to fruition, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s quote last year about creating better mobile viewing experiences has resurfaced in conversations about video content. Stephenson said, “[T]hink about things like ‘Game of Thrones.’ In a mobile environment, a 60-minute episode might not be the best experience. Maybe you want a 20-minute episode.”
While such a suggestion might seem radical, it does indicate how important mobile video viewing experiences and video content consumption have become – for both brands and consumers – over the past half-decade. And the production and consumption of video content is only expected to increase over the next few years.
In a recent blog post on Econsultancy, Rebecca Sentance writes that “video consumption on mobile has been on the rise since 2012, but really started to shoot upwards in 2015, with the global number of minutes viewed per day rising from around 14 minutes in 2015 to an estimated 35 minutes in 2018.” In addition, Sentance highlights the fact that livestreaming – which includes platforms like Periscope, Facebook Live, and Twitch – has shown a big increase in daily viewing hours between 2012 and 2017.
G. Scott Paterson, co-founder of The QYOU, which is focused on the creation and curation of short-form video content, explained that brands and organizations should start investing – if they haven’t already – in creating video that’s engaging and easy to view on mobile devices.
It’s clear from a number of reports that video is important now, but its importance, accessibility, and popularity will only increase more in the next few years. As Cisco outlines in a report from September 2017, global IP video traffic is due to grow threefold from 2016 to 2021, live video will account for 13 percent of all internet video traffic by 2021, and internet video to TV will grow 3.6-fold by 2021. That all means that video will continue to be a significant presence in the everyday lives of consumers, and that brands looking to meet their consumers where they are should think seriously about putting more resources into video content creation.
As G Scott Paterson also mentioned, the ways that people consume content is shifting and will continue to shift in dramatic ways over the next decade. He added that premium scripted content – shows like “Game of Thrones,” for example – that have traditionally been packaged in 30-minute or 60-minute runtimes may, as Stephenson predicted, give way in the future to shorter and more compressed creative content.
Video is already a great way to reach people, and with the expected advent of 5G networks in the next two or three years and consequent increase in network speeds and viewing capability, it will become an indispensable marketing and communication tool.