Cellphones have surely come a long way since their first days….

Recently, mobile video has been dominating industry news with definite promises of growth, expecting to generate roughly $16B in revenues worldwide by 2014. Similarly, “Mobile Video Services: A Five Year Global Market Forecast” states that mobile usage will rise by 135% over the next 5 years due to more people embracing mobile audio and video. Not to mention the number of users are vastly increasing worldwide – mobile subscribers in Latin America and Central/Eastern Europe are predicted to be 50% 3G converted up from 5% in 2008.

Cellphone displays are getting larger and more powerful making it obvious that video is going to continue expanding in both usage per person and amount that is available. With more companies beginning to offer flat rate mobile data plans, mobile video is more accessible to the general public assisting the growth of mobile data.

Is there a valid explanation for this fast paced increase? The recent stimulated mobile video growth most definitely ties into the launch of iPhone 3GS. Since the launch, YouTube has stated that mobile uploads have been soaring over the last six month with over a 1700% boost. The daily uploads alone have increased 400%…. YouTube believes that the growth is mostly due to more mobile phones with video capabilities on the market, which makes sense of course. If you provide people with advanced technology, they will use it.

By the looks of it, the mobile industry looks bright but what effect does that have on online video? Are we able to co-exist together or will one form of video eventually rule out the other?

In order to understand similar relationships better, I found a few quantitative case studies.  For example, in a relationship between those who listen to music with online streaming vs mobile phones,  the numbers indicate that when one goes up, the other goes down. This means there is only room for one of the above …

However, on the contrary the analysis for mobile video vs. online video streaming states that the two do not compete. In fact, not only do they not compete but they correlate strongly (on a coefficient of .57 to be exact). This is the unique role of video in digital progress and we are all right in the middle of it. People want more video, through more devices, in more places and times – the possibilities are unlimited. That’s definitely great news!