Cisco’s Visual Networking Index offers an insight into how online video will dominate AV’s future, says Bob SnyderIf the world’s online video viewers stood today in one place, they’d constitute the world’s third-largest country by population (behind China and India). In total, this population will spend well over half a million years watching online video in 2012.
Internet video will generate almost 10 exabytes per month in 2012. (One less-than-measly exabyte is 1018 bytes – so if you have a 1GB USB key in your computer, then think 1 billion times that amount of storage.) That’s just one statistic that pops out from Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI), an annual study of the impact of video networking applications.
As video usage increases, the average monthly IP traffic in 2014 will be equivalent to 32 million people streaming
Avatar in 3D continuously for an entire month.
That makes Cisco conclude that we’re racing into the next era up the evolutionary IT ladder: we’re approaching the Zettabyte Era. (A zettabyte trumps an exabyte; it equals 1021 bytes of computer storage.)
Which is one way of saying that video, once the exclusive realm of video specialists, is going mainstream. That changes more than just the rules of the game; it changes the game itself. Video is becoming synonymous with IP and a part of nearly every major IT networking experience.
It is worth looking at these conclusions from Cisco’s VNI:
- Video is now so often used concurrently with other applications (even with other video applications), as it becomes a persistent backdrop that remains ‘on’ even while the user is engaged elsewhere.
- By 2014, the sum of all forms of video will continue to exceed 91% of global consumer internet traffic.
- Video communications traffic (video via IM, video calling) will increase seven times over between 2009 and 2014, as face-to-face talking becomes an expected communications component... on multiple screens.
- Video-on-demand traffic will double every 2.5 years, through 2014.
- Bandwidth-hungry HD and 3D video will comprise 46% of internet video traffic by 2014; 3D alone is forecast to account for 4% of all internet video traffic.
