Who’s watching what? Insights into Video Consumption in India

In an earlier research of ours – User Behaviour on Social Networking Sites, we held back on some statistics regarding video consumption.

Well we’ll reveal comprehensive details when our complete report comes out, but let me reveal some more statistics…

First, a recap of what we’d mentioned:

"An interesting fact that we have noticed is the slow increase in the number of videos displayed / uploaded (On Orkut). It took time for users to figure out – how to exactly display videos. To share their own videos, they needed to go to YouTube or Google Video – create an iD, upload the video and then use the link on their Orkut account.
Quite a long tedious process and therefore we see lesser number of personal videos displayed on Orkut.

Videos like communities, reveal a lot about the user. You will get to know the kind of music he appreciates. Perhaps Google can later integrate a feature where ‘Similar’ videos can be displayed.
92% of the videos uploaded (which we came across) were Music videos."

Average number of Videos per profile on Orkut is a pretty high number – 3.98

You might be wondering how is that possible – since most of your friends on Orkut have their Videos number still stuck at 0?

Well that’s partly because of users like Paridhi, who have 100+ Videos linked on their profile. There’s no limit on the number of videos you can share. In fact quite a few users use this feature like a personal library.

(Note: We’ve considered only 1 such person in our study to avoid skewing of figures, but we even came across users like Prince who are sharing around 247 videos.)

A recent research by Nautanki.tv on Video Consumption also threw up some interesting figures:

• In India, 85% of video viewing happens from offices.
• 76% of all video consumption happens from the top seven metros / mini metros.

The golden duration for video content on the internet is put at  3.5 minutes by them and around 50% of the audience drops off at the 5 minute level.

By the way, Nautanki plays a 30 second Ad before and after then main content stream. Its surprising that users are actually patient enough to sit through a 30 second.

Their research further stresses on this point:

"The hold times (time spent by a unique IP on a video) is about 12 minutes which is understandable. Users have become innovative and pause the video just as it starts and let the progressive videos buffer while they do other things only to come back and watch the video once it is buffered."

Innovative viewers would avoid the Ads too.

Nautanki currently doesn’t offer a CPC (Cost-Per-Click) model – so they’ve not put much about the success of Video Ads. The international average supposedly hovers around the CTR (Click-Through-Rate) of 5% for Video Ads.

Consumption at Nautanki?
Nautanki claims to serve 1.5 million+ videos everyday to about 5,00,000 unique viewers. An average of 3 videos per user is rather high! But what’s even more surprising is that Nautanki gets less than 10% of video views from their portal.

That would mean 1.35 million+ videos are being cast by their 1200 content publishers. That’s an average of 1000+ videos per publisher per day. Staggering figures!

And 30-40% of these publishers are blogs!

If the above figures are to be taken seriously – video consumption via the internet in India has immense potential.

What some of the players in the Video sharing scene should look at:
 
A downloadable desktop application – which would serve fresh content on an hourly or daily basis. Users can subscribe to Channel Streams of their choice and videos can be buffered / downloaded whenever the Net connection is idle and served any time the user wants to see it.

Ideas @ WATConsult

Related posts:

Download any Online Video by a single click
User Behaviour on Social Networking sites
A Review of 20 Indian YouTube Clones