A recent mobile phone study indicates that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s iPhone users are more likely to watch videos on their smartphones than Android users. Ooyala (a web video company) reports that 67 percent of iOS users watched videos on their phones whereas 33 percent of Android users did.
It’s important to point out that Ooyala isn’t measuring the web video from all sources, they only include the videos from their own services and web player. However, Ooyala does handle a significant amount of video with 200 million viewers throughout the world, so their results most likely offers some clout.
It’s also important to note that this particular gap will most likely close over time. These particular results are from last year. There is another chart that compares Android and iPhone device shipments for last year. As more tech consumers choose Android phones over iPhones, this gap should narrow.
What this report doesn’t indicate is why iPhone users are more likely to watch videos than Android users. Perhaps, iPhone users purchase their phones for entertainment purposes or maybe iOS makes it easier to view videos than some Android operating systems. It’s true that Android comes in a wide range of phones, many of which lack the right technology and/or lag when streaming.
iOS systems are generally easier to use and most iPhone users buy their phones through LTE carriers like Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) and AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T).
Philip Elmer-DeWitt from CNN Money offered more possible explanations as to why the discrepancy:
- Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) users are different from Android users
- iPhones and iPads are easier to use and better optimized for video.
- Android users are less likely to be rich Americans with access to the high-bandwidth networks needed to stream video
- IDC’s shipment numbers are wrong — the explanation favored two of the five news reports we read Tuesday morning.
