Video ana­lyt­ics giant Ooy­ala has inter­est­ing news for mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies: video view­ing is migrat­ing to mobile big-time.

Ooyala’s Glob­al Video Index for Q1 2013, which crunched data from 200 mil­lion users in 130 coun­tries, makes for dis­rup­tive read­ing for the tele­vi­sion indus­try, too, espe­cial­ly tra­di­tion­al cable firms, which have been curi­ous­ly resis­tant to the rise of inter­net streaming.

A mobile video explosion

The Index shows that 10 per­cent of online video is now being viewed from tablets and smart­phones – a fig­ure which has big impli­ca­tions for mobile adver­tis­ing cam­paigns and for tra­di­tion­al cable com­pa­nies. The lat­ter sim­ply haven’t tapped the wire­less mar­ket at all. But tablets are the real star of the sto­ry: video view­ing on these babies soared by a third com­pared with Q1 2012.

If any­one in mobile adver­tis­ing still cleaves to the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom that peo­ple watch­ing online video like their sequences short and sweet, they’re in for a sur­prise. Over a half of the video con­tent viewed on mobile devices was long-form (i.e., more than ten min­utes in dura­tion). The days of short YouTube snip­pets are fad­ing – 25 per­cent of the video con­tent viewed on tablets was 60 min­utes or longer in dura­tion. Video pro­duc­ers, in oth­er words, are going to need to move to mobile if they’re to keep up with their cus­tomers’ requirements.

A new video era for mobile adver­tis­ing? 

And Video on Demand just doesn’t cut it amongst mobile users. There’s no doubt­ing that peo­ple like it, but not near­ly as much as they love live video. Four times as many tablet view­ers watched live (sports, spe­cial events, live news, etc.) as opposed to VOD, a ratio which was even more pro­nounced amongst desk­top view­ers where it reached 13 to 1.

Ooyala’s head of prod­ucts, insights and opti­miza­tion, Sud­hir Kaushik, said, “Cross-device mea­sure­ment is crit­i­cal for con­tent own­ers and broad­cast­ers as they move their pre­mi­um con­tent online. Our abil­i­ty to col­lect con­tent and adver­tis­ing data from each view­er on any device at any time and then process that infor­ma­tion into insights in real-time is what dif­fer­en­ti­ates us. With these insights, media com­pa­nies can take spe­cif­ic actions to deter­mine the appro­pri­ate device and ad strat­e­gy that result in the best pos­si­ble expe­ri­ence for its viewers.”

There’s an audi­ble rum­ble start­ing: video pro­duc­ers stam­ped­ing toward mobile.