Phones, tablets changing consumer behavior
Missed that Ramadan series of your favorite actor, or you want to watch the latest lecture in the field of quantum physics that took place in the United States. TV sets, cables, and satellite channels might not be your best options to view these events, most probably you would open your desktop or even better, your tablet and search for them on YouTube, Vimeo or Shahid.
It is a global shift in consumer behavior and media consumption — people are more attached to their phones and tablets rather than their TVs. Increase in networks bandwidth and digital recording technologies combined with the ease of watching and comfortable scheduling made that shift inevitable.
That what made Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO confirm in an advertising conference a few months ago that YouTube reaches more 18 to 49-year-olds on mobile alone than any cable network, and the amount of time people spend watching the video site is “hundreds of millions of hours,” as reported by The New York Times.
And when the YouTube chief executive talks, we may need to listen. YouTube, after all, was and still is one of the main drivers of video sharing technologies on the Internet. In that same conference, when asked about YouTube’s three top priorities, Ms. Wojcicki said, “Mobile. Mobile. Mobile.” Emphasizing the shift that is taking place in the market — a majority of YouTube views are made via smartphones or tablets instead of desktop computers.
“A lot of our focus is on how we continue to make that better. What are the user interface, experiences, what are the creation experiences, how do we make it really fast?” Wojcicki said. “I think mobile is changing everything and it will continue to change it more in the future.”
Such growth potential is not missed by other big players in the market. Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and others are all closely watching and experimenting with video sharing and streaming options. It is a wide-open arena to make profits in advertising and productions, video ads total around $150 billion a year in the United States alone. “This is a big market and I think Facebook and Twitter and everybody else has recognized this is a big opportunity and they are coming into the market,” Wojcicki said as reported by the Time.
“And I don’t think that’s a surprise because of the size of the opportunity and really the movement from traditional to online is really what I think is the most important move.”
In the Arab world, YouTube-based production companies are leading this movement to attract more and more customers to the online video world, although their popularity is thinning after the good start, their focus on comedy shows made them fall in the trap of repetition and rendered them unable to win new viewers from different social and educational backgrounds.
Also, Shahid, a mainly Arabic series sharing website owned by MBC group is establishing a new business model in the region that is based on ads and subscriptions. Rotana group seems to be testing the water with a similar initiative as well under the name Shoof.
It will not take long in my opinion till we see streaming service networks like Netflix and Hulu find a market in the region. OSN already started with a service named OSN Go. The shift is accelerating and we can only wait and see.
