This Chart Shows That Phones - Not Tablets Or TVs - Dominate Online Video

One of the biggest challenges for advertisers trying to reach consumers on their mobile devices is the size of the mobile screens themselves.

Especially when it comes to videos, which require a viewer's focus for long periods of time, the small screen of a smartphone can be a deterrent to people spending significant chunks of time consuming content on it.

But recent data from Ooyala, a firm that publishes and tracks online video, suggests that consumers are becoming comfortable abandoning the big screens of their desktops and laptops to watch video on tablets and smartphones. In fact, one chart from Ooyala's Q2 Video Index report, released in September, is sort of mind-blowing.

In it, Ooyala broke down the total time people spent watching longform online video in Q2 2013 by the four types of devices it tracks worldwide: desktop, smartphone (labeled here as "mobile"), tablet, and internet-connected, "smart" TVs. The results say a lot about mobile's viability as a video medium:

What the chart shows is that people spent more than twice as much time watching videos longer than an hour on their smartphones (21.02% of total time) than they did on their desktops (10.45%), an impressive display of people's comfort with the smaller screens.

It also shows that that for every single range of online content, more people are watching on their cell phones than on their desktops.

For the longest kind of online content, the tablet has become the first screen, nearly tripling the amount of time people watch hour-plus video on desktop (28.56% to 10.45%).