The number of people watching video content on smartphones has risen to record levels, a new study has found.
According to research by Deloitte, 58 per cent of smartphone owners watch at least one type of video content on their handsets every week. This compares with just 18 per cent in 2012.
Short videos, live posts and stories are particularly popular with smartphone users, with 17 per cent watching these every day.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this trend is especially common among younger people. Some 54 per cent of 16 to 19-year-olds were found to watch short form videos on smartphones at least once a day.
Similarly, one in five 16 to 19-year-olds were found to watch longer video content, such as TV shows and movies, on their smartphone every day.
Dan Adams, UK lead partner for telecoms at Deloitte, commented: “The smartphone is becoming more important for video. Mobile and fixed operators will need to ensure that their networks are configured to be able to cope with the expected demands that higher video consumption will place.”
Mr Adams stated that as network bandwidth improves, video could increasingly be streamed into buses, cars and trains for people’s consumption.
This, he said, would mirror what has happened with audio streaming in recent years.
Mr Adams went on to note that while smartphones have changed people’s social lives over the decade, they could potentially have a similar impact on people’s working lives in the next ten years.
“The smartphone’s attractiveness lies in the fact that it is the definitive multi-purpose consumer device: a digital Swiss Army knife with a set of tools that is millions of apps deep,” he said.
Mr Adams added that smartphone technology is “only getting smarter” due to advances such as facial recognition and machine learning.
As a result, it is a device that will “continue to offer an ever-widening array of benefits and challenges for years to come.”
UK public are ‘glued to smartphones’ as device adoption reaches new heights Deloitte
