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Mobile Video On Track For Three-Quarters of Traffic

Everyone seems to be neck down, hunched over their small screens these days, and if you’re wondering what the person next to you is doing, the answer is often: watching video.

Mobile data traffic grew by 69% in 2014, and video accounts for most of that traffic. In fact, the amount of mobile video moving across networks surpassed 50% of mobile data traffic in 2012 and pushed past 55% by the end of last year, according to the latest report from Cisco that tracks worldwide mobile traffic.

Within five years, nearly 75% of the content that moves across mobile networks will be video. That’s an increase of 13 times between 2014 and 2019. Services such as Netflix and YouTube that focus on video streaming will comprise 90% of total mobile data traffic by 2019. The growth in smartphones and tablets is playing a large part in driving these overall increases, Cisco found.

Interestingly, there are more mobile phones than people in the world. Cisco said that the number of mobile-connected devices surpassed the world population at the end of last year. By 2019, mobile phones will be even more popular, with about 1.5 phones per each person on earth.

To accommodate these increases in usage and traffic, expect speeds of global mobile connections to increase, surpassing 2 Mbps by 2016, while 4G traffic will handle more than half of mobile traffic by 2017.

Already, smart marketers have developed and implemented mobile video campaigns. These findings, however, highlight the critical importance of a mobile video strategy.

More evidence of the importance of the mobile screen came from Facebook’s recent earnings report, when the social media giant said that mobile ads were nearly 70% of its $3.6 billion in ad revenue in the fourth quarter.

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