Openwave Mobility’s Mobile Video Index (MVI), which analyses traffic data aggregated from live deployments in more than 30 mobile operators, found that in most developed markets, Facebook video is now trending upward relative to YouTube – while in a number of emerging markets, Facebook video has already overtaken YouTube.

Alongside the data from live operator deployments, this edition of the MVI incorporates an independent consumer survey of mobile video user habits covering 3,000 subscribers in Western Europe. Despite larger mobile screens with higher resolutions, consumers revealed that they prefer to watch videos on standard definition (SD) rather than high definition (HD), which can suffer from buffering.

The report also found that while video playback times on mobile are increasing, average playback buffer time remains stubbornly high at 7.2 seconds. However, subscribers will only put up with six seconds of buffering before abandoning a video in frustration.

“Subscribers are willing to pay for good QoE,” said Indranil Chatterjee, SVP, products, sales and marketing at Openwave. “Our study in Europe found that consumers are happy to pay an extra €7.50 per month for videos with less than two seconds of buffering. Operators can ill-afford to ignore the monetisation opportunities staring them in the face.”

Gorkem Yigit, lead analyst at Analysys Mason, added: “Inspired by operators such as T-Mobile in the US, research shows that zero-rating and unlimited data plans significantly increase video engagement time. With the right traffic management techniques, operators can contain network costs and launch viable pricing models and deliver a differentiated QoE.”