Nielsen reported few weeks back that on an average Americans watch 153 hours of TV every month and 3 hours of online video every month. Video ads are beginning to appear in newspapers! Video has a powerful impact, it is easy to share on social platforms, it is much less expensive to produce that in the past, and more and more people have access to it as technology and reach are improving.
Cisco’s recent forecast of IP traffic for the coming years, makes an interesting read. The company expects IP traffic to increase fivefold compared to today, reaching two-thirds of a zettabyte by 2013. That's two thirds of a trillion gigabytes with a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent. In 2013, the Internet will be nearly four times larger than it is in 2009. By year-end 2013, the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs will cross the Internet each month.
An important highlight of the Cisco report : A significant part of that traffic will be online videos, which will make up 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic by 2013, reaching over 18 exabytes per month. Internet video is now approximately one-third of all consumer Internet traffic, not including the amount of video exchanged through P2P file sharing. The sum of all forms of video (TV, video on demand, Internet, and P2P) will account for over 91 percent of global consumer traffic by 2013. Internet video alone will account for over 60 percent of all consumer Internettraffic in 2013.Video communications will be a formidable block in this traffic – Cisco anticipates an increase by around ten times by 2013 (in the next four years). As the global mobile explosion continues, it reflects in mobile video volume as well. Mobile online video watching is also expected to rise spectacularly, reaching 64 percent of the total mobile IP traffic in 2013, growing from 33 petabytes in a month in 2008 to an estimated 2,184 petabytes, this is 2 exabytes, per month in 2013. The increase represents a 131 percent annual growth rate. However mobile IP traffic will still be only 4 percent of the total IP traffic.
The volume growth also factors in expected growth in Peer-to-peer traffic, which is also expected to increase but its percentage of the overall IP traffic will decline by 2013. P2P networks currently use 3.3 exabytes per month and the numbers are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18 percent. However, overall P2P traffic will decline to only 20 percent of the total consumer IP traffic coming from 50 percent in 2008. Cisco expects file hosting services to grow instead at a much bigger rate of 58 percent per year reaching 3.2 exabytes per month in 2013.
The internet continues to grow. With more and more news of a global economic turnaround, the growth can only accelarate. The support Infrastructure needs to grow faster to keep pace and this seems to be happening. Since 2007, the annual growth rate of international Internet capacity has exceeded 60%. In 2009, international internet bandwidth increased 64%. In 2009, network operators added 9.4Tbps of new capacity—exceeding the 8.7Tbps in existence just two years earlier.No wonder the internet buildout phenomenon is indeed an amazing one
(Picture courtesy : Cisco)