Anyone who was skeptical that video would thrive on the small screens of smartphones and the only slightly larger screens of tablets had better sit down. The share of time that people spent watching videos on mobile devices rose 719% between the fourth quarter of 2011 and the fourth quarter of 2013.

And these viewers weren’t watching just six-second videos. More than half of viewers’ time was spent watching videos that were longer than 30 minutes, and 31% of mobile device viewing time was spent on videos longer than an hour. The data come from video analytics firm Ooyala, which tracks viewers for its publisher-clients and reflects the anonymized online video metrics of those publishers, including names like Bloomberg, ESPN, Pac-12 Networks and Yahoo! Japan.

Some of the data and conclusions about sports video are truly astonishing:

• Mobile viewers of sports programming spent 62% of their time viewing content longer than 10 minutes, probably highlight shows and game recaps.
• Smartphone viewers of sports content spent 39% of their time viewing videos up to 10 minutes in length.
• Tablet users viewing sports content spent 60% of their time viewing content up to 6 minutes in length.

On average, video viewers spent more than 42 minutes per play on live video streams to all mobile devices, compared with nearly 35 minutes per play on a PC.

By the end of next year, Ooyala reckons that 37% of all streamed video will be watched on mobile devices and tablets, and that by the end of 2016 50% of all streamed video will be watched on these small devices.

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