Apple iPhone and iPad users stream twice as much video as Android users, according to a new study conducted by video services firm Ooyala. The numbers are based on data gleaned from Ooyala's 200-million strong unique user base.
Apple iOS devices are being outsold by Android smartphones at a nearly three-to-one ratio, so Ooyala's findings are particularly interesting. A number of possible explanations may account for the numbers:
iPhones & iPads are better optimized, especially for video
An Android fanboy somewhere probably just lost his mind. Sorry, though, it's true. iOS is built in Objective-C, while Android is Java-based. Whatever your personal preference, lower-level languages are inherently more efficient than Java, and always will be.
iPhone and Android owners use their devices differently
This point is probably more of a thesis for a serious sociological study. At the very least however, anecdotal evidence suggests that iPhone and Android users aren't the same. How exactly they're different remains unclear (and perhaps unknowable), but the fact that they are is reflected in statistics.
iPhone users are young and affluent. Android users are old and poor
A Forrester Research report indicates that among iOS, Blackberry, Android and Windows Phone 8 users, iPhone owners are the youngest and wealthiest. Android users, on the other hand, tend to skew older and earn less money. Both these factors correlate directly to access to high-bandwidth Internet.
The statistics are wrong
Many of Ooyala's observations are inferred from statistics provided by IDC, which tracks smartphone shipment numbers. The obvious problem in this is it presumes that shipping numbers reflect actual end-user sales, which is far from a given.
Several publications, including Electronista, have speculated that the statistics are inaccurate and the discrepancy between sales and shipment numbers was highlighted during Apple's patent lawsuit against Samsung, where the former manufacturer was forced to disclose how many handsets it had actually sold.
