Video skyrockets in Bytemobile’s first analytics report

Mobile Internet browsing is catching up with laptop surfing sessions as touch smartphone subscribers browse a daily average of 38 minutes – more than half of a typical laptop session, according to mobile data optimization company Bytemobile’s inaugural Mobile Minute Metrics, released today. Web browsers still eclipse mobile video watchers by a factor of 10 to 15, but just one video user is consuming the same amount of mobile data as those 10 to 15 Web surfers, the company found.

For the fourth quarter, Bytemobile noted that video became the dominant form of mobile data traffic, accounting for 39% of the total volume on networks. Laptops still dominate the network at 94%, but smartphones – especially touchscreens – are a growing culprit. These devices generate 52% of the traffic on operator networks, Bytemobile said.

The average video on the mobile Internet was only 5 minutes in length, but 50% were played for 60 seconds or less, with the majority of users viewing only 10 to 30 seconds of the video. Bytemobile also found that mobile data usage occurs at all hours of the day – Web browsing increased in the daytime, and video consumption shot up at night.

“It is one thing to know the size of the videos on YouTube; YouTube can tell you that, but it’s another thing to know how much time people spent on a given video,” said Bytemobile's vice president of product management Joel Brand. An interesting YouTube trend he has observed is that of channel-surfing. Consumers will jump between 10 short videos on YouTube before they settle on a video and watch the full five minutes, Brand said. Roughly one-third of video usage today is on YouTube, and the rest of the 70% is split equally between adult content and something else, he said.

With today’s report, Bytemobile is trying its hand at in-depth analysis and reporting on the data traffic running in a carrier’s network. The company will provide the analytics as a new managed service to its wireless operator customers, spanning 12 of the world’s top 15 wireless operators, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

The goal of the analytics is to help operators make business decisions and discover new mobile opportunities, guiding them toward Bytemobile’s products in the process. Brand said these opportunities could include increasing the relevance of existing services through subscriber and content provider data, driving the deployment and marketing of new services based on usage patterns or assessing the impact of new service plans by learning consumers’ type, time and volume of data usage. With the content analysis, operators can also determine new partnership opportunities and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

In its analytics offering, a part of its Unison Mobile Internet Platform managed service, Bytemobile will get into the granular details of Web site browsing, page views, device usage and click-stream tracking.