Further confirming the notion that video usage is returning from the place from which it came, the humble living room, YouTube used this weekend’s IBC Show in Amsterdam to report that usage of its platform on TV sets is up 45% in the European Union.
More than 70% of YouTube viewing still occurs on mobile phones. But with YouTube now dabbling in business such as virtual MVPDs, an increasing amount of its long-form video is winding up on the bigger screen.
“Mobile phones aren’t even the fastest growing device these days,” said YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan, delivering an IBC keynote covered by UK paper The Guardian. “It’s actually screens like … the living-room screen or television sets, where people turn on the TV and open up the YouTube app when they come home from work, sitting on the couch or what have you.
“That today is about 180 million hours of watch time [a day], and in the EU that number is growing 45% year on year,” Mohan added.
YouTube is investing in machine learning and AI to improve the “lean-back experience,” Mohan said, delivering better search and recommendation so that viewers “don’t need to sort through an ever-growing catalog of videos to find something interesting to watch.”
