Get ready for the video tsunami

This year’s annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast from Cisco has been published and, depending on who you are, it makes for either encouraging or worrying reading.

One of the headline predictions is a four-fold increase in global IP traffic from 2010 to 2015, with volumes set to rise to a mind-boggling 966 exabytes per year. That’s nearly a zettabyte of information every year or, to put it another way, enough data to fill 250 billion DVDs.

This figure is based on the assumption that will be almost 3 billion Internet users by 2015 and, with the continued proliferation of PCs, smartphones, tablets and other objects of Internet desire, more than 15 billion Internet connected devices. Or, again, to put it another way – two devices for every man, woman and child on the planet!

And one result of all those users and devices? Well, a veritable tsunami of video traffic, with a million video minutes expected to be fed into the Internet every second by the year 2015.

And it won’t all be consumer uploads to YouTube either. Business IP video traffic is projected to grow by almost 40% per year in the run up to 2015, almost twice as fast as overall traffic growth in the business sector.

Encouraging news then if you’re in the business of developing new video devices and applications. A little worrying if you’re a telecoms or networking vendor looking to cope with this staggering rise in both global IP and video traffic.

Either way it makes for sobering reading which, if nothing else, will help concentrate minds on where we go next.