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
A friend of mine passed on the impressive J.P.Morgan 2008 report on the internet sector - titled, "Nothing But Net". Techcrunch has also written about the report. I see that Imran Khan and his fellow equities research team at JPMorgan predict the major publicly traded Internet publishers, portals, commerce sites and search engines will continue to outpace the performance of the overall stock market by wide margins through 2008. While revenue growth for the online sector is expected to "decelerate" slightly, the team expects the earnings of Internet companies to grow more than four times faster than those of the overall stock market during 2008. The report notes that internet stocks delivered almost three times the returns of S&P stocks in 2007. The report sees correlation between broadband penetration and ecommerce revenues. Khan expects online ad CPMs (cost per thousands) to "accelerate" during 2008 due to two big factors: a "tighter" supply of advertising inventory from major offline media outlets; and "better monetization techniques" from online publishers. The report revises the outlook for the global search advertising marketplace in 2008, predicting worldwide search revenues will rise to $30.5 billion from $26.2 billion in 2007. He attributed the growth to "strong volume trends, better-than-expected monetization, and continued robust growth in Continental Europe." Khan said search advertising will grow at an annual rate of 28% over the next four years, and would reach $60 billion by 2011. More sectoral M&A and consolidation is predicted as stronger companies shall get to do better and earn more cash. The report adds, traffic, technology and transactional volumes would drive such consolidation. Like every other tech players, international markets generate more than 50% of revenues for the players. With global GDP expansions global accelerating faster than that of the US – the revenue gap will further widen. Gobally well spread internet companies would benefit a lot. The report points out that Amazon, eBay, and Google all get about half their revenues from international markets. Yahoo gets only a quarter of its revenues from abroad. This should put at rest speculations centered on Yahoo – atleast for now, given the upside potential. Good news all around – the report sidesteps issues centered around potential global slowdowns.
Mark Cuban recently wrote, The Internet is dead and boring, while no doubt the underlying technologies of the web are are in a stable mode and unlikely to radically change in the near future. While we ait for http 3 or IPVx, the world ought to realise that a lot of additional value can come out of what we currently loosely define as the internet platforms. Some of them are the the modern wonders of the world/Marc Andreesen recently wrote about the internet platforms.
Umair picks up issues with facebook, the hottest name in the internet today.He argues that Facebook/F8 - is not a platform and the worldwide web is the platform - and every site or widget on it is also an open platform. His reasoning:
In yesterday's platform economy, scale in complements + technological specificity drove huge switching costs. But today, there is no hard technological lock-in - and it's very, very hard to create it. Let's say we create a closed standard. And we gain demand-side scale. He sees that Facebook has built a pseudo-platform. He is right that such platforms create no real entry barriers and switching costs can’t limit entry. As if taking the cue, Techcrunch points out that facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open - allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications. The internet economy is indeed amazing.
Mark Cuban recently wrote, The Internet is dead and boring, while no doubt the underlying technologies of the web are are in a stable mode and unlikely to radically change in the near future. While we ait for http 3 or IPVx, the world ought to realise that a lot of additional value can come out of what we currently loosely define as the internet platforms. Some of them are the the modern wonders of the world
This is an excellent piece coming as it is from Marc Andreessen: The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet. The platforms of the future will be online services that you will tap into over the Internet, perhaps with nothing more running locally than a browser. They won't have anything you download, or even an SDK. They will look more like services than software . Unlike the enterprise system with allows at best extension through API’s, internet platforms are more amenable. Here comes the gradation( level 1 to above they are harder to build but easier for the developer: • Level 1 is typically a platform provided in the form of a web services API - which will typically be accessed using an access protocol such as REST or SOAP.
• Level 2 apps historically has been used in end-user applications to let developers build new functions that can be injected, or "plug in", to the core system and its user interface- Photoshop, Facebook fall into this category. The technical expertise and financial resources required of a Level 2 platform's developer intending to build a meaningful app - are very high.
• In a Level 3 platform, the huge difference is that the third-party application code actually runs inside the platform - developer code is uploaded and runs online, inside the core system. The platform itself handles everything required to run your application on your behalf. The level of technical expertise required of someone to develop on your platform drops by at least 90%, and the level of money they need drops to $0. Which opens up development to a universe of people for whom developing on a Level 2 or Level 1 platform is prohibitively difficult or expensive. Level 3 platforms are "develop in the browser" - or, more properly, "develop in the cloud".
And which companies are working on Level 3 platforms, besides Marc's Ning? • Salesforce.com • SecondLife • Amazon (through AWS) • Akamai
For the avid value digger, the advice is to look for the new applications that a new platform makes possible. In the long run, all credible large-scale Internet companies will provide Level 3 platforms. Those that don't won't be competitive with those that do, because those that do will give their users the ability to so easily customize and program as to unleash supernovas of creativity.
Sadagopan's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Trends,Thoughts, Ideas & Cyberworld "All views expressed are my personal views are not related in any way to my employer"
