‘Online videos, the future of Internet’

Looking to watch an internet video or two on your mobile device?

Your changing habits then represent the future of the internet. Which, in fact, may already have arrived: online video now accounts for 40% of all internet traffic globally, edging out once-dominant file-sharing systems the industry collectively dubs peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which accounted for a similar proportion of traffic until last year.

Global networking giant CISCO’s latest Visual Networking Index (VNI) predicts that a mind-boggling 966 exabytes of data will be traded across the internet by 2015, a four-fold increase over the current traffic scenarios in just four years.

One way to interpret this figure would be to say that the gigabyte equivalent of all the movies ever made will criss-cross global networks every 5 minutes in 2015.

Over 60 % of this traffic is expected to be video content.

Current estimates for India are 9 million regular video users (out of a total of 72 million internet users in the country; which VNI forecasts to grow to 196 million users by 2015).

But all figures are dwarfed by China’s insatiable need to access video online. Its 283 million video users (of a total of about 470 million total users ) are by far the world’s largest video consumers, with the US (149 million ) a distant second.

via ‘Online videos, the future of Internet’ – Times Of India.