Internet Access has grown very aggressively in the last years. Why? What application are “normal” people using that requires this additional bandwidth?
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The answer to this question has changed lately. Just a couple of years ago the answer was quite easy: P2P. Eh? What’s that? P2P is the technology that allows us to share, always legally of course, music, videos and other stuff. For this you would use programs like eMule, Kazaa µTorret or Ares.
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Today the answer is very different. The dominant traffic on the net is Video!
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But saying video, just like that, without any further details, is the same as saying “I saw a woman”. There are many kinds of women out there: tall, short, fat, thin, blond, brunette, old, young (you get the idea… Right?) The same thing happens with video. There are many types of video.
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We have interactive video, or bi-directional, with Skype as an example for the consumer segment, or TelePresence in the corporate segment. And then you have non-interactive, or uni-directional video, with YouTube as an example for the consumer segment, or Cisco Show and Share for the corporate segment.
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Now… Why is video growing so much? There are four significant reasons:
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Migration of video from Standard Defintion (SD) to High Definition (HD)
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The quality of a video is determined by 2 factors: the number of lines we use to “draw” each picture, and the number of pictures we receive per second. Clearly the amount of information that we need to send (and receive) increases with the number of lines we use, and the number of pictures per second we receive.
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The images you see everyday on “normal” TV are drawn using 480 lines, and we receive 24 images per second. This is what we call low, or standard, definition (SD)
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The images from High Definition TV (HD) are drawn with 720 lines (720p) o 1080 lines (1080p or Full HD)
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YouTube allowed us to view the videos with one quality only: Standard Definition. That changed no more than a year ago. Now the users can choose which definition they want to see the video. Needless to say a High Definition video will take quite some time to download over a slow speed access, let’s say below 1MBps.
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Let’s remember that back in last October YouTube announced that it was delivering 1 billon downloads each day. Yes, you read that right, 1 billon videos on a daily basis. If we consider that now these videos are being downloaded in HD… we know start to have an idea of why video is starting to dominate the traffic in the global network.
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If we look at this phenomenon from the corporate side of the house, enterprises are now leaving behind SD Videoconference (that usually uses 384K video streams) for HD Videoconferncing or for TelePresence (not the same thing…) Just to grasp the dimension of this, one hour of TelePresence uses the same bandwidth as one year’s worth of email!
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Explosion of video generators/producers
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Who generates these videos? Only a couple of years ago we only watched professionally created videos: movies, music videos from MTV or VH1 and such. Try to think of the last 10 videos you watched on YouTube or Facebook. How many of these were produced by professionals? How many where created by friends using a digital camera or their mobile phones?
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The reality, today, is that anyone can create a video. Anyone. You only need a mobile phone… and you are a producer!
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The small digital cameras (known as P&S, or Point and Shoot) are equipped with the capability of shooting videos. Many of them do it in HD! Some of them in 720p, others in 1080p, but they all can do it.
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We now also have a new category of gadgets, like the Flip, that have the size of a mobile phone, and shoot videos in HD, and are EXTREMELY easy to use. You just press one button to start shooting the video, the same button to stop. Then you connect the camera to your PC and, automatically, a window pops up and asks you if you want to share the video in YouTube or Facebook.
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This combination of new technologies, easy access to these devices, and extreme ease of use, generated an explosion of people generating and sharing videos globally.
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Integration of video into different applications
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Today people use all kind of different applications like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or Hi5!, from a web portal point of view, or Skype, MSN or GoogleTalk, from an interactive point of view.
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These applications have many common characteristics that drive this explosion of video on the global network: they are very easy to use, which allow many people to use it, even if they don’t understand anything about technology. Also… MANY people use these applications… MANY!
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Why is this important? Let’s try to imagine what would happen if we have these 2 previous drivers: HD Video and many video producers, without the existence of these applications.
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Let’s say that I am having a great time on a week-end with my friends and we shoot a video that we are certain that many people will like it. How do we share it? How do we tell the world that we have this video available?
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Six years ago we would have called our friends so they could see it in our house.
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Two years ago we would have uploaded this video to YouTube and we would have sent emails, with the URL, to all our friends.
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Today we go to Facebook, upload the video and that’s it! Facebook automatically informs all our friends of the existence of our video. And people can see it right there, without going to another portal.
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More sophisticated people (or, should I say, if you are a geek) would upload the video to YouTube and then share it using Facebook and Twitter.
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In other words, these applications allow, in an extremely easy way, anyone to share their content to anyone, in a very short time.
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Universal Access
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Where can I watch my video? Again, the answer to this question changed in the last couple of years. The reality, today, is that I can watch the video in my PC, my phone, my house, my office, Starbucks, the airport… Anywhere! At any time!
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Today we have multiple devices that allow us to watch, very easily, the videos from anywhere at any time.
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The great challenge for Service Providers and Enterprises is to deploy a network infrastructure that supports all these videos and devices.
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In Cisco we are working on what we call medianet, the evolution of internet.
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A medianet is an intelligent network that is media aware (SD or HD video, interactive or not, audio, data, etc) device aware (Am I at home with my 50” plasma, my PC or my iPhone?) and topology aware (Am I at home over ADSL or Cable, on Starbucks over WiFi or in my office?)
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Conclusion
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Video is rapidly becoming the dominant traffic on the net.
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The combination of High Definition videos, the high number of people generating videos, applications that allow these videos to be shared, and the possibility to watch these videos from any device, anywhere, at any time, is generating this video explosion.
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Networks need to evolve to support all this video in an efficient way.
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Internet needs to evolve into a medianet. Are we ready for all this video?
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If you liked, or disliked, this post, please comment on it.
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Disclaimer: I work for Cisco on Collaboration technologies supporting Emerging Markets. This post is based on publicly available material that can be found in Cisco’s web site: http://cisco.com/go/medianet
