Video is on the minds of many networking hardware and software vendorsas its use increases among businesses and consumers. But two newreports from IT research companies cast contradictory outlooks on thefuture.
The Yankee Group said a U.S.surveysuggest the current economic crisis will make Internet video a championin 2009. Consumers are spending 11 per cent more time online thanwatching TV, it said in a news release, showing that Internet video isemerging as the key platform for the delivery of on-demand videoservices. It found that 56 per cent of television viewers are online atthe same time, browsing the Web or sending e-mail; 82 per cent ofInternet video viewers watch TV shows online because they missed theepisode on TV; digital video recorder (DVR) owners are more likely towatch online than they are to record a program in advance; and that 25per cent of the Internet video audience watches online programmingon-demand either once or several times per day.Wow. Serviceproviders ought to be rushing out to fatten their pipes for video,right? Not according to Freesky Research. The Arlington, Va., says itsresearch shows that visualization, not video is pushing networks past10Gb. David Gross, author of the report entitled “100 GigabitChronicles: Why VPNs, VLANs, and Visualization will be Killer Apps, butVideo Won't,” makes the following arguement: “When evaluating networksthat can surpass 10G, financial traders are measuring the reducedlatency for 200 byte trade orders, while research labs are measuringthe reduced latency for 200 byte MPI packets.” “Therefore, lowlatency for sub-kilobyte data transmissions is quickly becoming a moreimportant customer requirement for 40 and 100 Gigabit networks thanhigh 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.
