Nearly 60% of all online visits are now done on mobile devices. When you break that down, that’s 60% of the 5.35 billion daily internet users worldwide or, after a little napkin math, that comes to about 3.21 billion people. Fun to think of 3.21 billion people as your total addressable market, isn’t it?
Making sure images, videos, and content are viewable and engaging on 3.21 billion mobile devices is more than just a nice-to-have anymore. It’s essential. Here are two technologies that any digital team can roll out today: expansive video content and the JPEG XL image format.
An eMarketer study found that more than 75% of U.S. adults spend two hours or more watching short-form videos on mobile phones. Brands have a clear opportunity to capture a consumer’s attention with video, but they need to understand the intricacies of how video plays on phones.
- Roaming. If users are traveling, a good connection is never guaranteed.
- Poor performance. Similar to a bad connection, videos may not load or perform optimally depending on the user’s bandwidth or the device limitations.
- Slow responsiveness. Some phones can be slow to adjust between portrait and landscape orientations, impacting how the video fits the screen.
- Multiple screen sizes. The device pixel ratio for each phone size varies by brand and affects how a video willt play or how an image might look. Data and memory usage. Big videos require devices with memory and large files pull more bytes from the internet, which means more battery use.
These issues impact video delivery, performance, and visual quality.
Cloudinary’s video API can customize, transform, and automate videos to perform optimally. The platform’s automated functions support auto-cropping videos to always fit a screen, immediately adding in text overlays, and adjusting videos to play at the highest quality available through adaptive bitrate streaming and dynamic video transcoding.
Last year, at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced its support of JPEG XL, a move that energized those in the web community looking to accelerate the format’s acceptance.
Cloudinary has fully embraced the enhanced image format and the way it improves image compression and performance.
The format was co-created by Jon Sneyers, senior image researcher at Cloudinary.
Compared to the original JPEG format and the WebP and AVIF formats, JPEG XL delivers crisper images with additional benefits like:
- Reduced file sizes while maintaining a high-quality appearance.
- Faster encoding/decoding (compared to AVIF).
- Progressive decoding (advantage over AVIF) to satisfy impatient web and mobile app visitors while providing a smoother experience.
- Easy conversion of existing JPEG images to JPEG XL with no generation loss. No other new image format can do this. JPEG XL files are 20% smaller and can be converted back to the same JPEG file.
With Cloudinary and its automation capabilities, images can be immediately optimized, making full use of the JPEG XL format.
Together, these two technologies will play a role in fueling the momentum happening around mobile experiences. Cloudinary’s clients are already seeing the rewards of well-managed mobile content.
Working with movie theater chain AMC, Cloudinary helped optimize more than 7 million movie-related images for the mobile app, reaching nearly 180 million consumers over three months. Cloudinary’s automation also resulted in a 90% savings in time, reducing the hours spent on formatting and managing images for the mobile app.
To learn more about the potential of video and how to optimize images, contact us and we’ll ensure your mobile experience is spot on.
