IPTV Programming Featured Article

One Billion Over-the-Top Internet Video Viewers by 2013

By Gary Kim, Contributing Editor

The number of Web video viewers will nearly quadruple in the next few years, reaching at least one billion in 2013, say researchers at ABI Research (News - Alert).

 

If that proves anywhere close to being the case, if most of that viewing is of the on-demand sort, and if something fairly dramatic is not done about access network bandwidth and business models, unicast video might shape up as a business disaster.

 

It will be a disaster for users because the quality of experience will be highly uneven. Uneven quality will damage the content brands.

 

It therefore will not provide as much revenue for content providers and packagers, who will not make as much content available. That will depress usage, fees and advertising revenues.

 

With variable viewing experience and less content available, viewership will grow more slowly, delaying availability of more content, which again will slow viewing, creating a vicious rather than virtuous cycle.  

 

That might make access bandwidth providers happy, up to a point, as it will relieve strain on the access networks. On the other hand, over-the-top video appears to be unstoppable, so access providers such as Verizon and Comcast (News - Alert) already are getting into the game.

 

Some still-tricky business issues will have to be worked out so that access providers have incentive to supply the very-best access connections for over-the-top content. After all, there's little incentive to spend lots of money with no hope of return, and that's basically what an access provider faces in the case of over-the-top video, especially of the HDTV sort.

 

Video also will mean coming to grips with peer-to-peer delivery mechanisms. Content delivery networks or caching will help ease congestion on backbones. But managed P2P really does make sense for local distribution of on-demand video content.

 

That's clearly true for content owners and packagers and is starting to be seen as important by access providers as well.

 

Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

 

Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper is Accelerating 3G Mobile Video Communications, brought to you by HP Software.

Internet Protocol (IP)	X
IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data in packets over the Internet. I...more