Video Counts For 27% Of Internet Use

I believe we are done with the web 2.0 trend. Web 2.0 enabled people to get in contact with each other, share, but also creates online. It has been some kind of revolution, and now the use of social media is going mainstream, which changes the way companies and brands interact with customers.

This revolution has been supported by websites like Youtube or dailymotion, which allowed people to broadcast their own content in a very unique and innovative way. Thanks to the bandwidth capacity that rocketed up, video has become one of the most consumed media on the Internet. According to a recent study, video watching counts for 27% of the Internet use.

I have attended not so long ago the Parisian Videocamp 3, which was focused on the use of video on the Internet. There is still room for innovation in this business.

But something that is very interesting about this study, is to see that Youtube has revolutionized the way to consume video. Hence, in the web 1.0 era, video was mostly downloaded from peer to peer platforms, whereas now it is consumed instantly by streaming. This is now I believe the "web 3.0", or the evolution of social media: the Instant Web. It will be the theme of Leweb Paris conference. Consumer want everything now, and so do they for video. They don't want to wait for downloading content.

While the overall video numbers are up, Sandvine reports that P2P usage is down to 20 percent of total Internet traffic, from 32 percent in 2008. Sandvine said that the amount of P2P usage is growing on an absolute basis, but VOD applications are growing faster. Sandvine looked at the bits per second, per protocol, along with how many active hosts per protocol on the network.

This dip in P2P echoes other recent reports from Cisco and Arbor Networks that show use of peer-to-peer file-sharing as a percentage of broadband usage is on the decline. In June of last year, Sandvine said that P2P traffic was hogging up bandwidth, generating 43.5 percent of Internet traffic, but that study was just of several, unnamed “leading” service providers, which could explain the discrepancy from the 32 percent number released today.

I believe that the Internet is going to pursue its revolution on how we consume videos. The very same way it changes the way we consume Newspapers, or more widely written news, and radio, with customizable content and podcasting, the revolution of video consumption is on.