Introduction
Within the last few years,
internet streaming has skyrocketed. Everything from videos, music, VMs, even
video game emulation, has become a viral market that has a massive amount of
positive user feedback. The new market this has created is growing rapidly, and
technicians will have to watch out if they are going keep on top of it.
Video
Streaming
From the advent of Youtube in
2005, video streaming has become one of the biggest uses of bandwidth in recent
years. With with over 6 billion videos watched on Youtube every day, it is
amazing to think that Youtube accounts for only 17.1% of the video streaming
market share.
They are followed by Hulu, at 2.4%, and Amazon, which despite it's recent
influx of popularity over the last couple years, has a meager 1.3% of the
market.
However, the top streaming
service has got to be Netflix, which now has 32.3% of the market share, and is
continuing to rise. In 2013, the massive site clocked over 2 billion hours of
videos watched online. In fact, their continued growth has been so successful,
that in Q1 of 2013, they reported a profit of 1.02 billion dollars. This is
quite impressive for a company that started with just mailing DVDs.
Audio
Streaming
Audio streaming has been
increasingly popular with the invention of free music and podcast streaming
sites like Spotify, Last.fm, Pandora, and TedTalks.
Internationally, while the US
has been steadily growing, the UK has doubled their musical streaming from 3.7
billion songs in 2012, to 7.4 billion in 2013. Spotify, Google Play, and Rdio
are currently worth approximately 103 million pounds, which is about 171
million dollars. That would mean that 10% of the UK music market is now
streaming. This is up 34% from the 77 million pounds in 2012.
What
does this mean?
For the IT community, the increasing need for faster and better bandwidth
on which to stream media will open more network positions that deal with
managing network usage. There will also likely be a rise in companies looking
for network architects that can design networks which will be able to handle
the growing demand.
This means that technicians will need to stay on top of advances in the
networking industry, and will need to strengthen and develop their ability to
tell what is a strong, well built network, and what will not work in their
environment. They will also need to be able to help streamline their networks
for peak performance.
Hopefully, this growing trend towards the almost near constant streaming
of media will not take network technicians by surprise, and stronger, stable
networks will be the result.
Sources:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/09/100-million-american-watch-video/
http://www.statisticbrain.com/netflix-statistics/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57584535-93/video-streaming-is-on-the-rise-with-netflix-dominating/
http://www.exinda.com/blog/article/6-video-streaming-stats/#.Uyzg34UdOHg
