Video is on the minds of many networking hardware and software vendors
as its use increases among businesses and consumers. But two new
reports from IT research companies cast contradictory outlooks on the
future.
The Yankee Group said a U.S.survey
suggest the current economic crisis will make Internet video a champion
in 2009. Consumers are spending 11 per cent more time online than
watching TV, it said in a news release, showing that Internet video is
emerging as the key platform for the delivery of on-demand video
services. It found that 56 per cent of television viewers are online at
the same time, browsing the Web or sending e-mail; 82 per cent of
Internet video viewers watch TV shows online because they missed the
episode on TV; digital video recorder (DVR) owners are more likely to
watch online than they are to record a program in advance; and that 25
per cent of the Internet video audience watches online programming
on-demand either once or several times per day.
Wow. Service
providers ought to be rushing out to fatten their pipes for video,
right? Not according to Freesky Research. The Arlington, Va., says its
research shows that visualization, not video is pushing networks past
10Gb.
David Gross, author of the report entitled "100 Gigabit
Chronicles: Why VPNs, VLANs, and Visualization will be Killer Apps, but
Video Won't," makes the following arguement: “When evaluating networks
that can surpass 10G, financial traders are measuring the reduced
latency for 200 byte trade orders, while research labs are measuring
the reduced latency for 200 byte MPI packets.”
“Therefore, low
latency for sub-kilobyte data transmissions is quickly becoming a more
important customer requirement for 40 and 100 Gigabit networks than
high bandwidth for multi-gigabyte video transmissions.”
Which begs the question, if you're a service provider, what kind of demand are you seeing for video? Let us know.