• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 6, 2013

What’s the tallest hurdle standing in the way of better video delivery? Making it mobile-friendly, new research suggests.

Regarding their video efforts, the top concern among a small sample of marketers and publishers was successfully distributing content across multiple types of devices.

Overall, 77% of 85 respondents (or 65 of them) said seamlessly getting their video onto mobile devices was their biggest worry, according to a new study conducted by TechValidate on behalf of content delivery company Limelight Networks.

Some 69% of respondents cited the ability to effectively format content for mobile devices as a top operational challenge. What’s the best way for marketers and publishers to improve their mobile video delivery? First and foremost, produce a single master file using a standard codec, Limelight suggests.

Video makers should also know which device is requesting their video by analyzing the incoming request. That can be achieved with a bit of javascript connecting the device to the file format type.

It’s also important to analyze viewer behavior, according to Limelight, and to keep videos as short as possible. Speaking to the overall importance of video, 81% of respondents described video as extremely or very important in engaging customers, and believe that video allows for deeper engagement with audiences.

Making video mobile appears to be the key, however. Indeed, two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2017, according to a recent forecast in Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index.

Overall, mobile video will increase 16-fold between 2012 and 2017, accounting for over 66% of total mobile data traffic by the end of the forecast period, Cisco predicted.

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