By 2019, 80% of the World’s Internet Traffic Will Be Video

Video content accounted for an impressive 64% of all the world’s internet traffic in 2014, but even with all the ALS challenges, and cat videos that year brought us, we are due an explosion in consumption over the next 4 years. According to a new report from Cisco, by 2019, online video will be responsible for four-fifths of global Internet traffic. The stats for the U.S. are even more impressive, coming in at 85%.

Cisco states that the dramatic increase will not only be driven by the increased popularity of OTT video streaming services, but also by the sheer number of us that will be connected by 2019. Over half the planet (around 3.9 billion people) will have access to the Internet by that time, but the number of devices able to access the web will be three times as high as the global population!

This will have a huge impact on video traffic. In the new research Cisco predicts that traffic from wireless and mobile devices will rise to 66% of all traffic in 4 years, and these numbers are backed up by other research. In its recent study, the IAB confirmed that more viewers than ever are accessing video via their mobile devices, with around half of our daily consumption of digital media taking place through smartphones and tablets. According to another new report, this time from Ericsson, mobile video traffic will grow 55% per year until 2020.

Future Internet Traffic – Cisco Predictions for Video:

• By 2019, 80% of global Internet consumption will be video content.
• It would take an individual over 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every single month in 2019.
• OTT streaming will fuel the growth, as 4K video becomes the new standard for consumers.
• Global IP Traffic to Reach 2 Zettabytes (100 trillion gigabytes) by 2019.
• Traffic from wireless and mobile devices will rise to 66% in 2019.
• Every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross I.P. networks by 2019.
• Internet video to TV grew 47% in 2014, will increase fourfold by 2019.
• Consumer VoD traffic will nearly double by 2019, to the equivalent to 7 billion DVDs per month.

Predicted Internet Video Traffic: 80% by 2019

Cisco predicts that consumer internet video traffic will dominate other types of traffic by 2019, taking a massive 80% share of the global market, but add VoD, P2P, and business consumption to the mix and the figures nudge their way up to the 90% range. Cisco defines ‘Internet video’ as short-form content (i.e YouTube, Facebook), long-form (i.e. Hulu), Internet-to-TV (i.e Netflix), as well as live-streaming, online rentals and purchases, and webcam views, and estimates that content delivery network traffic will deliver over half of all internet video traffic by 2019.

To put that into perspective, it would take a single person 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross the network in a single month in 2019. That’s a mind-blowing stat for the industry, but as the Internet gets bigger, the demands on infrastructure capable of delivering content to users are going to get even more urgent.

You can download the new ‘Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology 2014–2019‘ report directly from the Cisco site.