Smartphones Fuel Digital Video Viewership in Mexico
January 16, 2015
Digital video is the bread and butter of internet users in Mexico. Three-quarters of the country’s online population will consume digital video content at least once per month in 2015, eMarketer estimates, putting Mexico ahead of the UK and nearly on par with the US for this key metric of web usage, according to a new eMarketer report, “Mexico Digital Video 2015: A Medium Best Served with a Focus on Demographics.”
As in many other markets, rising smartphone adoption is driving digital video consumption in Mexico. In fact, a number of sources indicate the majority of consumption is already coming from mobile devices.
Google and TNS data supports the notion of a mobile-dominated digital video market.
According to the poll, 78% of smartphone users in Mexico watched mobile video on such a device at least monthly. By that measure, the country outpaced Latin America’s other giants, Argentina (58%) and Brazil (73%).
When it comes to device usage for premium content consumption, such as over-the-top (OTT) video-on-demand (VOD), however, PCs still reign supreme in Mexico. According to July 2014 data from The Competitive Intelligence Unit, 80% of consumers accessed such content via PCs. Trailing at a considerable distance came smartphones (33%), TVs (19%) and tablets (15%).
A number of factors explain these results. One is premium video content requires a fast, reliable internet connection and a decent-sized screen for best results. In Mexico, such conditions are best met by PCs with a fixed web connection, given that not even 3G networks are ubiquitous and the cost of connected TVs keeps them out of reach of large swaths of the population.
Another is OTT VOD services are still a niche market in Mexico and should not be considered a broad reflection of the country’s viewership preferences. For example, a 2014 Dataxis Intelligence study found there were roughly 4.5 million total OTT VOD subscriptions in Latin America in Q1 2014, 45.6% of them, or roughly 2 million, in Mexico.
Courtesy of eMarketer
