Video consumption in UAE, Saudi Arabia exceeds global average

Dubai: Video consumption in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Turkey exceeds the global average due to the increased social networking and app usage on smartphones in 2016.

Rafiah Ebrahim, head of Ericsson Middle East and East Africa, said that over 70 per cent of smartphone users in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE watch videos on social networking websites at least once a week, compared to 65 per cent of global average.

”44 per cent of them believe that they cannot live without social networking, which is nearly twice as much as the global average of 24 per cent. Moreover, YouTube and Facebook were consistently shown to be the apps with the highest total data traffic in multiple countries across the region,” she said.

According to the Ericsson Mobility Report for the Middle East and North East Africa, mobile data traffic will multiply 13-fold while average active smartphone data consumption per month will increase from 1.8 giga bytes (GB) in 2016 to 13GB in 2022.

She said that smartphone uptake is a key driver for data traffic. Between 2016 and 2022, smartphone subscriptions will more than double, from 230 million to 480 million.

By the end of 2016, 33 per cent of subscriptions will be smartphones — and by the end of 2022, this figure will increase to 56 per cent.

Furthermore, mobile data traffic across the region will reach around 4.8 exabytes per month by the end of 2022, which is nearly 13 times greater than the figure at the end of 2016. This is a direct result of an increase in smartphone data consumption per month.

The report showed that mobile subscriptions are growing steadily across the region and are seen reaching 690 million by the end of 2016 — close to 8 per cent of global mobile subscriptions — and 850 million by 2022.

Ebrahim said that LTE subscriptions are rapidly increasing and are expected to account for 7 per cent of total mobile subscriptions by the end of 2016 before shooting up to 38 per cent by 2022.

”Digital technology is fast becoming part of everyday’s life in the region,” she said. “It highlights the rapid uptake of LTE deployments across the region, paving the way for 5G where we are expecting 20 million subscriptions by 2022.”