Understanding Mass-Market Mobile TV Behaviors in the Streaming Era

Despite claims of Mobile TV's mainstream arrival in 2010, it took until 2017 for watching professionally-produced television content on mobile phones to truly become a mass-market phenomenon in America, with half of all TV content expected to be watched on mobile phones by 2020. But what professionally produced content are people watching on their phones and when are they watching it? Are there any clusters of behavior that emerge in the broader population when it comes to watching TV on the phone? We set out to answer these questions through two surveys deployed to representative samples of online Americans. We discuss our findings on the mass-market arrival of mobile TV viewing and differences from how the HCI community has previously envisioned mobile video. We conclude with implications for the design of future mobile TV systems.