AWS has launched a new service that uses artificial intelligence to convert video into vertical formats optimized for mobile and social platforms in real time.

The company is touting its new AWS Elemental Inference, as a tool that will help broadcasters and streamers reach audiences on social and mobile platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts without manual post-production work or AI expertise.

Although today’s viewers consume content differently than they did even a few years ago, most live broadcasts are still produced in landscape format for traditional viewing. Converting these broadcasts into vertical formats for mobile platforms typically requires time-consuming manual editing that causes broadcasters to miss viral moments and lose audiences to mobile-first destinations, according to AWS.

AWS Elemental Inference uses an agentic AI application by analyzing video in real time and automatically applies the right optimizations at the right moments. Detection of vertical video cropping and clip generation happens independently, executing multistep transformations that require no human intervention to extract value.

AWS Elemental Inference analyzes video and automatically applies AI capabilities with no human-in-the-loop prompting required. IT applies AI capabilities in parallel with live video, achieving 6-10 second latency compared to minutes for traditional post-processing approaches. This “process once, optimize everywhere” method runs multiple AI features simultaneously on the same video stream, eliminating the need to reprocess content for each capability.

The service integrates seamlessly with AWS Elemental MediaLive, so AI features can be enabled without modifying existing video architecture. AWS Elemental Inference uses fully managed foundation models (FMs) that are automatically updated and optimized, so no dedicated AI teams or specialized expertise are needed.

Regina Rossi, head of product for AWS Media Services explained how development of the tool was driven in large part by live sports and the importance of using metadata in the conversion process.

“One of the things we’ve been hearing from our customers is that they need help when it comes to understanding the context of what's happening in their video—in particular, live sports which is their most valuable content,” Rossi said. "So we wanted to provide them with the appropriate metadata that gives them the ability to transform their video in a way that's meaningful.

“They want to meet their viewers where they are more and by that I mean, a lot more of their viewers were watching content on mobile phones as an example,” she added. “And for them to be able to be formatted for that mobile native viewer, they had to convert their horizontal video into vertical video. And so what we wanted to be able to do was actually use the right set of x, y coordinates, and be able to create things like a saliency map so that the focus of that video is going to be in that vertical frame.

“So when you're watching it on a phone, it actually moves with the action, so you're not missing out on what's happening in a scene.”

One of AWS’s earliest customers, Fox Sports Digital, reinforced how important vertical video is to the network, Rossi said, adding that “90% of their content is actually consumed vertically.”

Rossi emphasized that unlike earlier efforts in this space, AWS Elemental’s AI architecture is not just about “following the ball” during live play. The company has tested the technology on a variety of sports and found that a lot of them actually lend itself well to a vertical format, according to Rossi.

“Ones that might be harder are things like tennis, where you have a ball that's traveling really fast between opposite sides of the court. But even then, one of the things that we do is we make adjustments to some of the foundation models that we use,” she said. “So as an example, we're not doing just object tracking. We're not just following a ball back and forth. What we're doing is actually creating a saliency map, so understanding where the action is happening in a scene, and so we're able to then follow the action, not just the ball.”

Key Features at Launch

• Vertical video creation – AI-powered cropping intelligently transforms landscape broadcasts into vertical formats (9:16 aspect ratio) optimized for social and mobile platforms. The service tracks subjects and keeps key action visible, maintaining broadcast quality while automatically reformatting content for mobile viewing.
• Clip generation with advanced metadata analysis – Automatically detects and extracts clips from live content highlights for real-time distribution. For live broadcasts, this means identifying game-winning plays, touchdowns, and emotional peaks with precise start and end points—reducing manual editing from hours to minutes.

Now Available
AWS Elemental Inference is available today in 4 AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai). AWS Elemental Inference can be activated through the AWS Elemental MediaLive console or integrate it into workflows using the APIs.

Customers pay only for the features used and video processed, with no upfront costs or commitments, meaning that customers can scale during peak events and optimize costs during quieter periods. More features and capabilities will be introduced throughout this year, including tighter integration with core Elemental services and features to help customers monetize their video content better.

Big Blue Marble has been named as Launch Partner with AWS Elemental Inference integrated into Big Blue Marble’s cloud-native Cloud Video Kit platform

The company will demo AWS Elemental Inference at its Booth (W1701) in the West Hall during the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22 in Las Vegas.

To learn more about AWS Elemental Inference, visit the AWS Elemental Inference product pag

TYSONS, Va.—In a notable example of how local broadcasters are responding to widespread usage of mobile video, Tegna is making a major bet on mobile video with the launch of new mobile apps across 50 markets.

The innovative new apps deliver up-to-the-minute coverage of news and weather stories from its local journalists and meteorologists and provide users with thousands of original daily mobile videos in a scrolling vertical feed that are personalized for users based on individual preferences.

The new mobile apps are part of a larger strategy by the station group to transform its news operations into 24/7 story-first newsrooms, built to capture and deliver local stories in real time as they unfold.

“Our audiences rely on us for credible, local coverage that helps them stay connected to their communities and make informed decisions in the moment. That’s why we’ve reimagined our newsrooms as story-first operations, built for speed and accuracy around the clock – not just fixed broadcast timeslots. This app is an expression of our local newsroom of the future, where great local journalism meets people exactly where they are, on the devices they use throughout the day,” said Adrienne Roark, chief content officer, Tegna.

The new mobile app first launched in four beta markets – Atlanta, Denver, Indianapolis, and Seattle – and is available for download in both the App Store and Google Play Store, with other Tegna markets launching on a rolling basis over the next few weeks.

The new app is already delivering strong results. Video plays are up more than tenfold during the testing period, and user sessions have increased by 40%.

“By emphasizing digital design and the user experience, we’re delivering what audiences truly want: real-time, easy-to-watch video updates from trusted local reporters and weather teams,” said Dhanusha Sivajee, chief experience officer. “We’re encouraged with the early audience response and plan to release new mobile features on a regular basis tied to the valuable feedback we receive from our users.”

“To make true 24/7 news coverage across all screens possible, we had to reimagine the software powering our local teams from end-to-end,” said Kurt Rao, CTO. “Employing cutting-edge technology has unlocked more time for the teams to create original content for streaming and mobile.”

Tegna described the key features of the new mobile app as follows:

• Elegant design and fast video and image load times;
• Localized onboarding and active customization so users can quickly set location, interests, and notification preferences for the topics they care about most;
• A personalized home feed that surfaces the most important local news and weather stories in real time, tailored to each user;
• Story summaries that combine text, visuals, and related coverage so people can choose to skim, watch, or dive deeper into any story;
• A social‑native vertical video player that offers an immersive, scrollable feed of short original clips from local reporters and meteorologists;
• Best‑in‑class local weather with customizable forecasts, maps, and alerts powered by station meteorologists;
• Topic exploration hubs that highlight in‑depth coverage of key local and national priorities, including politics, public safety, education, sports, and community life;
• Premium integrated advertising solutions that give brands new ways to reach highly engaged, local mobile audiences;
• Profile and account tools that let users manage preferences, save stories, and receive alerts across devices.

NEW YORK—MiMojo, a new company focused on mobile content delivery, will debut its new iOS app at the Broadcast Education Alliance Conference (BEA), April 16-17, taking place in conjunction with the NAB Show in Las Vegas.

MiMojo, developed by seasoned media tech founder and mobile journalist, Mick Reed (Clippn), is designed to streamline the process of sending and receiving mobile video files for videographers, editors, producers and archivists.

MiMojo is designed to integrate with other platforms for limitless workflow options and compatibility, and is the first mobile app of its kind to address the rapidly-emerging issue of managing mobile content, the company said. MiMojo is also offering customizations for the enterprise, tailored to a media company's unique needs including enhanced security, custom metadata and caption forms, MAM/CMS integrations and mobile video workflows.

MiMojo, which is available for beta testing beginning next month, enables senders to quickly trim media files, add metadata and captions, and seamlessly upload footage, while receivers of the files can change video format specs at the point of download, assign and track footage, and optimize their workflows. Be it a newsroom, editing team, media archive, stock footage service, or user generated content, MiMojo makes the looming tidal wave of mobile content creator footage significantly more manageable, usable, and easier to monetize.

Key Features
The MiMojo development team leverages deep roots and broad experience in production, post-production and media workflow technologies to develop a professional tool specifically to manage the massive influx of professional video content shot on mobile phones. Key features of MiMojo include:

• Intuitive Upload Wizard - Provides a simple, secure method for uploading mobile video footage with source metadata and captions;
• Trim Files on Upload - Allows users to easily trim just the parts they need to send while keeping source file specs, eliminating the need to send large media files;
• Custom Metadata Form - A customizable metadata and captions form enables users to select the metadata fields they need for their specific workflows and content management systems;
• Transcoding in the Cloud - Receivers can change formats, frame rates and resolution of files at the point of download based on their specific needs;
• Assignment Manager - Enables users to assign and track footage, and receive status notifications;
• Send Full Res by Default - Mobile filmmakers will send the full res files easily without worrying about quality loss, with an option to compress the files in phone for faster upload if slower connection speeds and tighter deadlines demand it.
• Integration - MiMojo is the best mobile video upload tool and is designed to integrate with other platforms, workflows, and marketplace endpoints for limitless workflows and compatibility; stay tuned for partner announcements.

MiMojo is currently in beta testing, with a planned release this summer. Details on pricing will be announced at launch. For more information, or to sign up for the MiMojo beta, visit https://www.mimjo.co

Executives from MiMojo will be on hand April 16-17 during BEA 2023 in Booth B107 in the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. 

Online video provides consumers with the convenience to watch what they want, when they want, provided everything goes according to plan. As the recent Disney+ launch showed, streaming can also provide a great deal of pain when users click the “play” button and then experience buffering.

Unsure if their video will begin in 1 second, 10 seconds or perhaps never, viewers are forced to wait, reboot their service, or choose another video. More than one-third of U.S. viewers feel this frustration, contributing to churn and cutting into profit.

A well-funded, beloved brand like Disney will survive these early buffering issues, but as competition ramps up, these problems have the potential to hurt other VOD providers much worse than they have in the past. Streaming services must grasp how big the buffering issue is and take steps to reduce its negative impact, before it potentially puts them out of business.

THE MOBILE EXPERIENCE

Nowhere is this more important than in mobile, which accounted for 22% of streaming hours in Q3 2019, according to Conviva. While mobile’s share of viewing hours is less than half of connected TV, its rate of growth was still 33% in the quarter, which is not insignificant.

The trouble is that mobile viewership is more likely to introduce buffering issues. More often than not, buffering is a result of poor internet connection. Viewers want to see content while they’re on the go, but movement means they are often in and out of strong signal throughout their journey. In fact, motion isn’t even required: it can be difficult to get a strong cellular signal inside a building, and even hotels can have spotty in-room Wi-Fi service.

Mobile streaming quality is getting better, but not enough to meet viewer expectations. According to the same Conviva study, mid-stream buffering on mobile devices improved by 34% year-over-year. Unfortunately, video start failures improved by just 2% in mobile, well below the rate of improvement in PC and connected TV. Video start time was also a mere 4% faster, hardly a great leap. It would be foolish for streaming providers to pat themselves on the back for improving the mid-stream experience when so many viewers still have trouble getting videos to start playing in the first place.

THE COST OF BUFFERING

These start-time issues have a domino effect, eating into potential time those viewers could spend watching content. A “rebuffering ratio” (the percentage of time a viewer spends waiting, as opposed to watching video) of less than 1% results in 2.9 billion viewing hours lost to buffering in one quarter.

Buffering’s impact on the viewer experience only gets worse when ads are introduced, as 39.6% of streaming ads actually failed to load in Q3 2019. If pre-roll ad delays reach 5 seconds, 13.6% of viewers abandon the stream. This results in less available ad inventory, cutting into ad-supported VOD profits and prohibiting advertisers from reaching valuable audiences. Advertisers aren’t going to pay if their ads are responsible for killing viewer engagement, rather than inspiring it. Just like viewers, advertisers are going to seek out frictionless experiences to get their money’s worth.

While buffering is a common part of the streaming video experience, it still has the potential to erode viewers’ good will. It may be outside of VOD providers’ control, but consumers aren’t always aware of who’s to blame. They focus their anger on the brand name in front of them, which is the provider itself. Buffering happens, but VOD providers can’t simply accept buffering as inevitable, less they face this ire from choice-rich consumers.

That’s because above all else, subscription and ad-supported VOD services are all competing for viewer engagement and time. The average household subscribes to three video services, and even with programming getting spread out across more services, it’s unlikely that viewers will add more subscriptions. Capture viewer attention, and that viewer will continue paying a monthly subscription or engaging with ad-supported content, while also spending less time with competing services. Failure to fight buffering—and the poor experience that it brings—is just giving the viewer a reason to cancel their subscription. And the result could be catastrophic for a VOD provider going forward.

Dan Taitz is president of video technology company Penthera.

The number of mobile phone users in Latin America is exponentially growing, and there’s no wonder why the region is sometimes referred to as the next big mobile battleground. This reality is radically shifting the consumer landscape, presenting an important argument for media providers to rethink their digital strategies.

It’s exactly this skyrocketing usage of mobile phones where the La República Media Group saw an opportunity to reinvent their brand for modern media consumers. That’s why the content giant from Peru partnered with Streann, a digital company providing advanced multimedia platform solutions, to build brand new streaming capacities from scratch. And this time, the main star of the show was video content.

Instead of allowing themselves to be disrupted, the company decided to become a disruptor. And this move certainly paid off: Read the story about how a media company reinvented itself from a traditional newspaper read over the morning cup of coffee, into a multimedia platform with a variety of features, now accessed by thousands of users every day.

THE MOBILE REVOLUTION

Latin America is the world’s second fastest-growing market for mobile subscribers just after Sub-Saharan Africa. The region with a population of approximately 640 million people already has 415 million mobile phone users—out of which over 200 million use a smartphone. And some believe these numbers to be even higher, noting that the region itself has a higher number of people using their devices to access the internet than in the U.S.

This trend moves the traditional channels for audience engagement, such as newspapers, TV ads, magazines or billboards, toward playing the second fiddle. As even the established media houses are gradually being shaken up, they need to face the harsh truth: It’s time to embrace digital transformation or be prepared to perish.

This was the exact philosophy that incentivized La República, the second-largest print and digital organization in the country, to revamp its entire strategy. With its legacy stretching all the way back to 1981, the media group had an impressive history to build on. But would that be enough?

A JOURNEY INTO CONSUMERS’ MINDS

The average Latin American media consumer now wants different things than they wanted a decade ago—and thanks to the internet, they have a much wider array of choices. Apart from the desire to interact and engage, there is an obvious need for immediacy: After all, with features like live streams, we are enabled to access information and content in real time. Shorter formats tend to be generally more popular due to decreased attention spans but it all depends on the message that the content conveys. But above all, these realities make us realize one thing: The current landscape strongly favors videos.

For La República, the main challenge was bridging the digital gap by moving onto the second screen. However, by building a brand-new app called RTV, its partner Streann enabled the company to upgrade from print content to a new 360-media model, including non-linear and on-demand TV built exclusively for the mobile world.

The company had two main goals. First, it wanted to have greater control over its audiences and access consumer data to construct advanced customer profiles and fuel corresponding marketing efforts. Second, the company aimed at creating a brand-new business model for monetization. Both of these aspects came together in the innovative solution that didn’t require a subscription, nor a pay-per-watch model. The app incorporates a unique technology that displays an algorithm-chosen ad in a separate smaller window within the same screen, instead of directly interrupting the viewing.

GEARED FOR SUCCESS

The integrated app took six months to develop and prioritized a design that serves viewers, instead of overwhelming them. With simplicity and user-friendliness being the priority, it presents a straightforward viewing mode and intuitive selections. Apart from suggesting on-demand content based on consumer behavior and preferences, the platform is armed with a powerful newsfeed section that enables a visual approach to journalism, allowing RTV to connect with their audiences at a multimedia level. According to La República, this set-up has increased the group’s potential to reach over a million new users.

But let’s get to tangible numbers: RTV has registered 25,000 daily users that consume approximately 20 minutes of videos per day. The completion rate was measured to be at 80%, concluding a set of success metrics. The viewability—meaning whether the person really is consuming the content—increased by 70% compared to the previous channels. This is why the CTO of La República Media Group, Alfieri Noce, was confident enough to say, “Building upon our legacy in newspapers, we are now the most innovative media group in Peru.”

However, what’s perhaps the most interesting is the demographics. Approximately 60% of the registered users are international, meaning that the app managed to attract audiences from across the region. La República was also surprised that over 50% of the app users are millennials, compared to the usual 30%. This leads us to the assumption that free dynamic video content on mobile presents a great opportunity to engage with one of the most lucrative population segments in the region.

Gio Punzois the CEO of Streann.

STOCKHOLM—As wireless providers worldwide expand their rollout of 5G services over the next several years, one wireless vendor believes there will be 10 million subscriptions to the next-gen wireless standard by the end of 2019, with that number expanding to 1.9 billion by 2024, representing more than 20% of all mobile subscriptions.

According to Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report, most new 5G subscribers will be users trading up their 4G handsets to 5G-compatible devices, but by 2024, many young users in mature markets will get a 5G smartphone as their first device.

4G LTE subscriptions will peak at 5.3 billion subs by 2022 and start to decline but will remain the dominant wireless service with about 5 billion subs by 2024, according to the report.

The total number of smartphone subscriptions worldwide by the end of 2018 numbers 5.1 billion, 99% of which were for 3G or 4G with the overall number of subscriptions to reach 7.2 billion by 2024. Subscriptions for fixed broadband are expected to grow only 3% over the period with subscriptions for mobile PCs, tablets and routers to grow moderately, reaching 330 million within five years, according to the report.

As has been predicted for years by Cisco, video will dominate mobile data traffic for the foreseeable future, with video traffic expected to grow 34% annually up to 2024, representing nearly 75% of all mobile data traffic by then, up from 60% in 2018.

The main drivers for video traffic growth vary, according to Ericsson.

“Mobile video traffic growth is driven by the increase of embedded video in many online applications, growth of VOD streaming services in terms of both subscribers and viewing time per subscriber, and the perpetual evolution towards higher screen resolutions on smart devices,” Ericsson said. “All these factors have been influenced by the increasing penetration of video-capable smart devices.”

Spectrum sharing is expected to help facilitate faster 5G rollouts, the report said.

“A fast way to build coverage is to utilize existing frequency band used by today’s LTE networks,” Ericsson said. “By implementing spectrum sharing, service providers can run LTE and 5G traffic on the same bands. This enables them to provide 5G coverage quickly but requires device chipset support. Chipsets are currently in development and are anticipated to be in 5G commercial devices in late 2019.”

Geographically, the largest consumer of mobile data traffic is North East Asia (China) and India logs the highest average usage per smartphone. In terms of 5G subscriptions, North America is expected to lead the way with 270 million 5G subscriptions, representing more than 60% of all mobile subscriptions by 2024.

Total mobile data traffic continues to grow globally and is predicted to reach 131 exabytes by the end of 2024, the report said.

An abundance of streaming services and video content has led to a rise in mobile video viewership, with 62% of global video views happening on the phone or tablet. Whether the viewer is looking to watch a prestige TV series, an award-winning movie, a live sporting event or a short video, they all expect the same thing: when they hit the play button, the video will start instantly and play flawlessly.

Unfortunately, there are still times where the viewing experience fails to match viewer expectations. Slow start times and buffering are still major issues for mobile video. As media companies invest billions of dollars to build streaming services and produce content, even small issues in the playback experience could derail them, regardless of whether the service itself is at fault.

A 2018 study conducted by OpenSignal gave countries around the world qualitative scores on their overall mobile video experience. The U.S. ranked near the bottom with a 47 out of 100. (75-100 is Excellent, 65-75 is Very Good, 55-65 is Good, 40-55 is Fair and 0-40 is poor.) That’s in a developed nation. In India, a country where mobile video viewership is exploding, the mobile experience is even worse. (This is not good for a service like Netflix, which recently announced major plans to expand into the Indian market.) The country that ranked highest in the study, the Czech Republic, still only got a score of 68.

This shows that there’s a lot of room to improve when it comes to mobile video. In fact, in a more recent OpenSignal study, the four largest US carriers—Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile—were rated as merely “fair” providers on the mobile video quality scale. The study cited prolonged stalling and long wait times for high-resolution video. And that’s not acceptable.

Mobile video is still talked about as a “new” technology, which means it gets graded on a curve. It’s somewhat similar to mobile advertising, where ad buyers are told that they’re overachieving if even 70% of their video ads are actually seen. Mobile video buffering used to be really bad, so now that it’s OK, everyone seems to accept that as a victory. But viewers themselves aren’t going to stand for minor improvements. In this era of cord cutting, consumers don’t see mobile video as an emerging replacement for TV. It is TV in viewers’ eyes, and they’re comparing their mobile video experiences to the cable experience.

Cable customers are rightly dismayed if a channel change takes longer than a fraction of a second, and cable operators task dozens of engineers to fix the problem. If cable subscribers experienced poor experiences like buffering and degraded picture quality on a regular basis, they would look for an alternative provider or cancel their subscription. In this regard, OTT services need to start acting like cable operators, striving for 99.99% availability and reliability. We need to fix the quality and reliability problems wherever they occur, from the origin cloud to the last mile.

And the time to act is now. Mobile video providers content to wait for the worldwide deployment and adoption of 5G or some other magic bullet will be the losers in the intense battle for mobile viewers already well underway. It’s time for the mobile video industry to pull out all the stops and effectively present an experience that resembles traditional TV when it comes to quality and reliability. Rather than aim for modest year-over-year improvements in buffering and other performance standards, the industry needs to aim for something much closer to 99.99%.

Dan Taitz is known for transformative work with some of the biggest names in media, including Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Univision Communications and Oxygen Media, where he negotiated the sale of the company to NBC Universal. As president and COO of Penthera, Dan has a deep understanding of how video service providers can create a deeply-engaging, consumer friendly experience in the mobile video space. 

EMERYVILLE, CA.—How good is the experience viewers are having watching streaming mobile videos? Gracenote, a Nielsen company, aims to find.

Gracenote today announced its new Mobile Video Analytics Solution for MVPDs, mobile operators, streaming services and hardware. The product gives them a way to better understand how the performance of mobile apps is affecting the way users behave, their attitudes about the experience and how consumer engagement with an app stacks up against competitors, the company said.

“In a hotly-contested marketplace for subscribers, it is critical to understand the factors that drive engagement and retention,” said Mike Greenawald, senior vice president, connectivity at Gracenote.

The in-depth examination of user interaction and engagement with mobile apps includes key performance metrics, such as the name of the wireless/internet service provider and type of streaming content.

The Mobile Video Analytics Solution provides insights into the performance quality of mobile video services, which is the greatest contributor to a viewer’s experience and satisfaction.

It also collects analytics on engagement, which include how, when and where viewers watch, how long they watch and other factors like stickiness of content, payload, network access and speed.

With the Mobile Video Analytics Solution, the attitudes of mobile users also can be measured on pricing and why viewers choose to subscribe or drop subscriptions as well as their intention to switch to another service.

Insight on these metrics can be measured against the performance of competitors with their subscribers, allowing streaming services to make course corrections to remain competitive.

When engagement is low, the new solution offers support for passive video tests and survey responses to examine behavior and find out the reason for disengagement and churn.

With the new analytics solution, wireless service providers also have the ability to detect areas of network congestion, which can guide them on where to add capacity.

More information is available on the Gracenote website. 

Media agency GroupM has forecast that time spent with online media worldwide in 2018 will surpass time spent with linear TV.

The report comes during NewFront week, a time when digital programmers are pitching advertisers on the importance of reaching consumers via online and social media.

Consumers worldwide will spend 3.69 hours per day with online media worldwide, compared with 3.63 hours spent with linear TV, according to the GroupM report. That gives online a 38% share and TV a 37% share of the media day, weighted by local media investment.

That compares with 2017's 3.53 hours with digital media and 3.71 hours with linear TV.

In the U.S., TV still holds an edge over online media, with 4.59 hours per day forecast for TV in 2018 versus 4.20 hours for online. But TV’s share of the U.S. market is declining. GroupM pegged it at 39% in 2018, down from 41% in 2017, while online will rise to 38% from 36%.

[Read: Cord-Cutting Spreads Beyond U.S. Borders, Says IHS]

The increase in time spent on digital corresponds with a increase in e-commerce. GroupM predicted worldwide e-commerce will increase 15% in 2018 to $2.442 trillion, or 10% of all retail.

GroupM also looked at how media was being transacted. It found that 44% of online display advertising was transacted programmatically in 2017, up from 31% in 2016. GroupM forecast that rising to 47% in 2018.

Only 22% of online video was transacted programmatically, but that’s up from 17% in 2016 and will rise to 24% this year, GroupM said.

STAMFORD, CONN. – Technology research company Gartner Inc., is forecasting global mobile data traffic will reach 52 million terabytes in 2015, an increase of 59 percent from 2014. Gartner predicts that growth will continue through 2018, with mobile video taking over a majority of total usage, hitting 60 percent by 2018. To help meet this demand, Gartner recommends communication service providers raising data caps to meet consumer needs.

Gartner surveyed 1,000 smartphone users in the U.S. in the third quarter of 2014 about their mobile usage habit. The survey revealed that Americans watch an average of 17.4 minutes per cellular video session; Germany, who Gartner also included in the survey, averaged 10.6 minutes. The biggest market for mobile video usage proved to be families with children, who proved to be the least concerned about using cellular data to stream video.

“With video usage as a percentage of total data usage set to rise from 50 percent now to 60 percent in 2018, we should expect CSPs to offer the best-of-breed video experience to consumers,” said Jessica Ekholm, research director at Gartner. “This involves using video optimization technologies and caching content closer to the consumer. Contract plans that single out video traffic to allow users to reach a certain cap (without touching their contract data cap) will increase usage and revenue for CSPs and meet consumer demand for more mobile video.”

You can find the full report on Gartner’s website.