Super Bowl Mobile Buzz

In addition to being an American cultural institution, the Super Bowl clearly ranks at the top of the list when it comes to annual media events capable of driving unique online traffic patterns and bursts of popular content. This is highlighted by the large number of YouTube views of popular Super Bowl advertisements generated in a short period of time. While this year's video ad fare may not rack up the same numbers as the classic Darth Vader Volkswagen commercial from last year's Super Bowl (ranked #5 among the top ten ads of the last five years by Neilson, with over 50 million views to date), the trends are compelling, particularly as they relate to mobile traffic. Clint Eastwood's already iconic "Half-time in America" video for Chrysler has already been viewed more than 4 million times in 4 days. In a blog post this week, Google reported that approximately 41% of searches related to Super Bowl ads made during the game came from mobile devices, a figure that reflects the increasing use of smartphones and, more recently, tablets for digital media consumption. According to a recent survey from comScore, for example, the mobile media user population in the U.S. grew 19% in the past year to more than 116 million people at the end of August 2011; with U.S. tablet traffic growing from 22.5% to 28.1% of non-computer traffic in just four months (May to August, 2011).

As we've highlighted in previous posts, the rise of mobile video traffic and concentration of the videos among fewer content sources and distribution points, represents an opportunity for optimization technologies that exploit repeat traffic patterns in the RAN where congestion poses the greatest risk to positive subscriber experience. While video content concentration trends may vary market-to-market, the impact on capacity planning in an operator's network is the same.