Video now half all mobile traffic, still growing

50 percent of all mobile data traffic is streaming video, according to the latest figures from Ericsson. By 2022, that number will reach 75 percent.

In addition, Ericsson predict there will be almost 10 times more mobile traffic in 2022, which means there’ll be over 53 billion gigabytes of video being played every month.

Sources of high-res video are plentiful: more websites than ever are embedding video players and multimedia elements and the screens on smartphones and tablets keep getting larger.

Social media accounts for 38 percent of all mobile data, larger than audio streaming or software downloads.

Social media feeds are the main way many people are directed to online videos. However, there has recently been a shift away from traditional social networks, like Facebook, and towards communication-oriented apps like Snapchat and Whatsapp.

YouTube remains the dominant platform for on-demand video, with around 1 billion monthly visitors it accounts for between 40 and 70 percent of all video traffic around the world.

In some countries, local alternatives for video hosting have begun to draw meaningful traffic away from YouTube, although it is likely to remain the number one video site overall for the foreseeable future.

Netflix has continue to expand its worldwide reach and is now available in most markets, although its share of video traffic varies from between 10 and 20 percent to virtually nothing.

Tablets are rapidly becoming the most popular way to watch video, thanks to a solid balance between portability and viewing quality, so it’s little surprise to see that video is already using 60 percent of all mobile data traffic for tablets.

While smartphones are still a very popular way to watch video, they are generally used to watch shorter clips – like those frequently embedded in social media feeds. Tablets, on the other hand, are commonly used to watch full-length movies and other long videos.

As technology on both the network and user side improves over the coming years, more and more people are going to be looking to mobile broadband as their main channel for entertainment.

MAIN IMAGE: Flickr/Fred Bchx