Commentary

To Hell With Mobile: I Like My Video On The Big Screen

Although the amount of time Americans spent with mobile devices has surpassed the time they spent with television sets for the first time this year, giving cell phone video companies an orgasm, you need to read the fine print. 

In fact, eMarketer estimates that Americans will spend 209 minutes daily watching TV this year, about 2.2 times the 97 minutes they spend watching digital video each day. 

I am always flabbergasted when I see someone watching a video on their phone, especially if it is long-form, like a TV show. I guess I am old-school in that I like to see my video on an LED screen no smaller than about 45 inches across. 

Big screens don’t work so well on a subway or sitting in the park waiting for that perpetually late friend to arrive -- and to be sure, mobile beats pay-per-view in your hotel and is a great time-killer at an airport. 

And that is how I see mobile video: as a time-killer. As a friend of mine says, it is the difference between intentional viewing and interstitial viewing. At the moment you have a lot of money lining up behind Jeffrey Katzenberg and his theory that now we are firmly living in the mobile world, folks are ready to watch their cell phones just like their watch their TVs -- especially if it is top-quality entertainment served in bite-sized pieces. 

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I don’t think so.

We have already been exposed to short-form video online, and I can’t remember the last time someone spoke with any enthusiasm about the programming they witnessed. Even Seinfeld joking over coffee in cars got stale.

Before the Feds shut down YouTube’s recommendation engine (because it can be used by pedophiles to watch your kids playing at the pool), it was a fabulous way to kill time. Until the ad interrupts the video, then you simply move on to the next video before suddenly realizing it is 1:30 in the morning and you have killed an hour and a half watching old George Carlin and Richard Pryor clips.

But there is a big difference between killing time with online video and tuning in to watch your favorite drama on a TV or laptop screen. I think your mindset is entirely different, and this affects how you view commercials. 

Mobile advertising is simply terrible. Regardless of all the claims to the contrary, it is badly targeted. I see ads for stuff I would never buy. It can also be interruptive enough to make you simply skip over what you thought you wanted to watch.

Despite mobile screens growing into the size of small dogs, viewing anything important on them is still hard -- especially if you need to see something in detail to understand what is transpiring. This has a negative impact on the quality of mobile-delivered brand messages as well.

And 5G notwithstanding, rebuffering is still a problem. An Akamai study found a 1% abandonment rate in each instance of rebuffering. With the average play being eight minutes long, in a year, rebuffering would have lost nearly 500,000 hours of viewership, totaling 10.7 million ad impressions.

Finally, mobile is very personal. Some argue that makes it especially good for some brands, but I think overall it hurts them. I know when I have on the TV to linear or OTT programming, I am one tiny part of a vast audience, so am prepared to be hammered by ads. 

But I feel like my phone is mine, and there is no collective "we." So a misguided ad or one that renders poorly or jumps uninvited into my content is something of a personal affront.

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