iOS losing its dominance in mobile video

Went from 80.9 per cent of Vid.ly smartphone traffic in Q1 2011 to 40.6 per cent by Q4.

The stats come from Encoding.com, the video encoding service behind the Vid.ly video platform.

Vid.ly was deployed a year ago to solve the complexities of delivering video to HTML5 browsers and mobile devices.

It transcodes source videos into 24 different video formats, stores them for delivery and then uses device detection to deliver the best quality viewing experience.

When it launched, the traffic was coming overwhelmingly from iOS devices. But over the course of just 12 months that dominance has evaporated thanks to Android – and also other formats (Blackberry, Linux, Windows, Symbian, and Nokia), which between them have upped their share from 8.9 per cent to 35.4 per cent.

“While mobile videos views on Vid.ly were dominated by Apple iOS devices early in the year, we’ve seen video viewing from Android devices growing significantly in the second half of 2011,” said Jeff Malkin, president of Encoding.com. 

“I believe this is a lagging trend of not only increased Android device sales throughout the world, but an improvement in devices to better support viewing video.”