While I expect Nielson to say that, what I didn’t expect was that they would show mobile viewing on par with internet viewing. That is certainly suspect and looking a bit more closely at their charts it makes more sense.
The top chart indicates that people watch as much on their mobile phones as they do on their computers. The second chart puts this in context, the number of internet users watching video is 131,102,000 and the number watching mobile video 13,419,000, 1/10th of the number. Taken across all of those users, the average monthly video viewing time on the internet is only 3 hours while the mobile user are up to around 3 1/2 hours.
This seems pretty out of whack but then again, the top/first 10% internet viewers are probably watching 10 times that amount (I know I am with NetFlix, Hulu, BitTorrent, YouTube and the like), it seems out of whack because you are only seeing the power users on the mobile phone accessing video while you are seeing broad viewership on the internet.
Consider it this way:
Internet: 131,102,000 users x 3 hours = 393,306,000 (almost 400 million hours)
Mobile: 13,419,000 users x 3.5 hours = 46,966,500 (approximately 47 million hours)
(mobile stills seems a bit over reported but taking into account the numbers they are talking about, it seems more likely)