Vuclip: iPhone tops list of worldwide video consumption

At last night's MobileMonday in Jakarta, Nickhil Jakatdar, co-founder and CEO of Vuclip flew down from the United States and presented some insights into mobile video consumption. Vuclip is a company that delivers mobile videos to any video-enabled device.

While it's dwarfed by YouTube, Vuclip still delivers more than 350 million videos per month to more than 25 million viewers in 200 countries around the world. It's primary markets include India, Saudi Arabia, United States, United Kingdom, Indonesia, and Mexico.

Jakatdar's visit coincides with the release of Vuclip's latest Global Video Insights report which the company makes available on a monthly basis. The report reveals that aside from a dip in February, the number of mobile video consumers have been on the rise this year.

Vuclip had delivered just over 200 million videos to mobile devices in January and in June that number had crossed 350 million, a 175 percent increase in six months. The number of viewers went from 18 million in January to over 25 million in June. That means the average number of video views per person had gone from around 11 per month to 14. In a single month, Vuclip delivers 750 terabytes of video.

Jakatdar remarked that by 2014, smartphones and other mobile devices will pass traditional computers as the primary devices in which consumers watch videos. Currently, the iPhone is the top device for watching video in Vuclip's environment.

This corresponds to a report released in May 2011 by FreeWheel which discovers that 80% of mobile video consumption in the US happens on an iOS device with 30 percent each on iPhone and iPod touch and 20 percent on the iPad.

Vuclip's report however only saw the iPhone's rise in June overtaking the BlackBerry 9700 as the top mobile device to watch videos. Outside the United States, various BlackBerry models still dominate the top five devices followed by assorted Nokia phones.

Unfortunately Vuclip's report does not say the proportion of videos consumed by each device, so there's no information in terms of consumption share, although the report does say that the iPhone is the leader in Singapore, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates while BlackBerry leads in Canada, the UK, and Venezuela.

“July marks a major inflection point in the smartphone race,” he said. “While we know Apple is a media darling in North America and Europe, it’s interesting to see that it’s now become an increasingly popular smartphone in international markets in terms of mobile video consumption.”

He pointed out that there are four stakeholders in a video environment. Those are consumers, content providers, OEM, and advertisers, so anyone delivering mobile videos will need to consider those four factors.

He added that content providers can monetize through premium services such as movie or music video portals, video ringtones and video alerts. While delivering feature length video over mobile network is still a long way away especially in emerging markets, he said providers can work with movie distributors to deliver short clips from the movies for example.

In Indonesia, the top most watched videos belong to the entertainment category, followed by news, celebrities, music and sports.