Visual Space

For some reason there are still people who are convinced that no one is going to watch anything longer than about 10 seconds on their cell phones. Typically, the reason given is that the screen is too small.

That complaint makes no sense. You don't sit a foot away from your television screen and you don't watch your cell phone from across the room. In fact, if you sit in front of your television where you typically watch from and then hold your cell phone up at the distance you normally look at it from you'll find that both screens fill roughly the same amount of your visual field.

The cell phone screen will probably appear slightly smaller, but not dramatically so. Probably the difference between, say, a 35" screen and a 27" screen viewed at the same distance.

I do think that mobile content should be kept under two minutes in length, but my reason for that has more to do with viewing habits than with screen size. Mobile viewing typically happens during what I call "interstitial time" which I define as a period too short to get anything meaningful done but too long to do nothing. Like when you're standing in a line waiting for a sandwich, or waiting for your kid to get out of school, or sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office.

These are perfect situations for viewing short videos on a cell phone or video iPod. And people typically have many short periods like this in the course of a day.

Strong, compelling content designed to fit into this sort of situation will get watched.