Video Is No Longer The Future of the Internet. It’s the Present.

November 20, 2008 in digital video news, web video by Josh

Ten years ago I sat down with a VP of Cisco Systems and told him the future was video on the internet. At the time, he thought video would always be a minor, though growing element. He said “people don’t want to watch video on their PCs, they want to watch video on their TVs.”

I disagreed, and told him that in a few years it would be the #1 highest traffic driver on the net, and the #1 reason for people to upgrade their (Cisco) routing systems.

As I predicted, internet traffic is skyrocketing, propelled by video.

“The majority of the traffic growth is occurring in the consumer space, driven by consumer Internet or video, whether it is IPTV or frankly even video over the Internet,” said Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president of the service provider routing technology group at Cisco Systems, who provided the following data:

Now let’s look at what type of video is fastest-growing:

Though growth of 300%+ is nothing to sneeze at, what jumps out from this chart is that internet video shown on a TV screen, presently a paltry 332 PB (petabytes), by 2012 is estimated to be 3,458 PB- an increase of over 10x (1,000%) over the next three years.

This means, by the end of 2012, internet video watched on a TV will be more than half the traffic of internet video watched on a computer. If this trend continues, after another few years TV will overtake the computer as the main screen people watch internet video on.

That is not a huge surprise, but what does it mean? Since by 2012 almost everyone will have 1080p widescreen TVs, people will demand far higher quality internet video. No one’s going to watching YouTube video on their 52″ LCD… at least, I hope not!

This bodes very well for the world’s best web video publishing tool, DV Kitchen, and the world’s best “video vending machine”, the MOD Machine.