Video CDN Market Growth Slowing, But Should Reach $1B By 2015

In addition to my role at StreamingMedia.com, I’ve also been a Principal Analyst at Frost & Sullivan in their digital media group, for the past five years. Part of my job is to track the growth of various products and technologies in the video ecosystem and provide research and analysis on market drivers and restraints. One of the reports I author each year is about the size of the video CDN market. We’ve recently published our latest report and findings and expect the video portion of the CDN market to reach about $1B by the end of 2015. (contact me if you want to learn about how to get a copy of the report)

Some might notice that our 2010 CDN report suggested that the video CDN market would grow to $1B by the end of this year, but as we saw and heard from CDN vendors in 2011 and 2012, traffic growth on their networks didn’t grow as fast as they were expecting. While video traffic is one of the fastest growing segments of the overall CDN industry, it is also the most volatile when it comes to pricing and volume trends and has very low margins. While we originally thought the video CDN market could grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28% until 2015, the latest data shows the market growing by 15.2%. The good news is the market is still growing, but that the rate of growth has slowed.

Our market sizing numbers do not include telco CDN revenue or revenue from licensed CDN services, a separate report we are currently working on. There is still money to be made in the video CDN business, especially at scale, and 2012 saw pricing remain very stable, with my expectations that 2013 will be the same with no major declines in video CDN prices. Add in the new CDN business models we are seeing from the likes of Netflix, along with what service providers are deploying and they is plenty of growth still to come from today’s video delivery infrastructure market. (For a complete list of all the CDNs in the market, see www.cdnlist.com)

Note: We are currently working on an update to our Transparent Caching report and will be putting out a new report this year on the size of the Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA) market. Contact me if you want to be added to the list to be notified when they are available.