International TV show site Viki announced today that it has had more than 10.2 million installs of its mobile apps which are available on Android, BlackBerry, iOS, and Windows Phone. The number of installs marks nearly a 7x increase over the same period last year and more than 15% increase over the last quarter. Viki also released other statistics with regards to viewership behaviors which shows that iOS users watch 2.5 times more videos than Android users despite being fewer in numbers. It’s worth reminding that videos on Viki are all free to view.
As of June 2013, Viki’s viewership on mobile applications is still dominated by Android users which make up 58.6% whereas iOS users reached 35.6%. Both BlackBerry and Windows Phone viewers combined for 5.8%. It’s important to note that these are just numbers on mobile applications, the report does not count viewers who stream videos through Viki’s mobile site. With more than 22 million total monthly viewers on all devices, this means nearly half of Viki’s viewers prefer to use mobile devices to watch videos.
Differences between behaviors of iOS and Android viewers on Viki don’t stop there. When it comes to telling other people what they watch on the service, Android viewers overwhelmingly prefer to share to Facebook (60%) than to Twitter (12.2%), with the rest choosing to share through other social networks. iOS viewers on the other hand, while still preferring to share to Facebook, they do it much less so. 45.1% of Viki’s viewers on iOS share to Facebook while 41.9% share their videos on Twitter.
The top five subtitle languages on Viki are English, Spanish, Arabic, Indonesian, and Korean, but this does not necessarily translate to corresponding regional viewership breakdown. Viki’s largest base of viewers are in North America as the United States and Canada take up the top two spots on the service which helps explains why English is the most popular subtitle language. However, neither Latin America nor the Middle East are the next top region on Viki’s list.
Despite being fourth on the list of translations, Indonesia is number three on Viki’s top viewer country list which means that outside of North America, Indonesians are the top video viewers in the world for TV shows streamed through Viki. The next two spots are taken by Mexico and Malaysia. Regionally, Southeast Asia is second behind North America as Singapore and the Philippines are also among the top 10 viewing nations on Viki.
Q1 vs Q2 2013
There are some differences to Viki’s numbers compared to what was shared by e27 back in April. At that time, with more than 7 million mobile viewers, Android users make up 74% while only 22% prefer to watch Viki’s videos on iOS devices. With this month’s data, it means Viki has had a significant increase of iOS viewers over the last quarter to push the device ratio from more than 3:1 in favor of Android to 1.6:1.
Among Android users back in Q1 2013, the Galaxy S3, Note, and S2 were the top three most popular devices used to watch videos on Viki whereas iOS users prefer to use iPhone 4, iPad 2, and iPod touch. While Viki did not share the corresponding information for this past quarter, claiming that 41% of mobile viewers watch videos on tablets means there’s a huge shift of device preference and perhaps even ownership among Viki’s viewer base.
e27 also reported back then that Viki’s monthly active users were 50% of its total and 75% of viewers had come from the US, Asia, and Latin America. Compared to this past quarter, this may still remain as Mexico and Chile are among the top 10 viewing countries on Viki and Spanish is the second most popular subtitle language on the service.
It is without a doubt that the most popular TV series being streamed on Viki are drama shows, with an overwhelming preference for Korean series simply based on the number of Korean shows being made available on Viki, but that doesn’t mean it’s all Korea all the time. Fans of older American TV shows can also re-watch some of their favorite series such as Law & Order, Xena Warrior Princess, Hercules, the new version of Battlestar Galactica, and a handful of others from NBC Universal.
Unfortunately for fans of British series, it seems that licensing from BBC may have expired and not renewed. While classics such as Fawlty Towers and Blackadder may have graced the pages of Viki from 2011, they are now no longer listed on the site, perhaps due to lack of popularity among Viki’s viewers.
