IT Trends: Internet Streaming

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