Digitaltveurope.com

Russian online video streaming service Ivi.ru claimed it exceeded 19 million monthly unique visitors for the first time in the first half of 2013. 

Announcing half yearly figures, the VoD service said that visitor numbers were up from 10.7 million monthly uniques in the first half of 2012. Registered users were also up year-on-year to 3.7 million in the first half of 2013, compared to just 416,000 a year earlier.

Monthly video views now stand at around 150 million compared to 44.3 million during H1 2012, while Ivi claimed that its share of the online video ad market also increased by two percentage points to 18%.

“Ivi.ru is a driving force behind the rapid development of online video viewing and online advertising in Russia. We offer free high quality licensed video content from the world’s largest movie studios and expect to maintain the growth through expanding our online library and introducing new services,” said Ivi.ru founder and CEO Oleg Tumanov.

“In May 2013 ivi.ru started offering full-HD video and we expect this to become a standard option in the near future.  We are focused on growing our multi-screen offering and enhancing the user functionality, which allows customers to tailor their viewing preferences according to their tastes.”

Ivi.ru claims its application is now installed on 7.7 million devices, including 1.2 million smart TVs and 6.5 million mobile devices. Ivi.ru is available on smart TVs produced by LG, Samsung, Philips, Toshiba, Sony and Panasonic.