Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) is an annual forecast of Internet traffic trends that has become a staple of the content delivery industry. It’s hard to go to a conference or attend a webinar without seeing Cisco’s data quoted, along with the projected hockey stick of traffic volume, with the majority being video. Two months ago, Cisco released their latest data and viewed from the 30,000 foot level, the narrative has not changed.

Consumer Internet traffic continues to grow dramatically, at a 32% CAGR from 2011 through 2016. In fact the forecast itself has grown; in 2011 Cisco projected total 2012 consumer Internet traffic at 24,476 PB/month, but this year’s report shows 2012 at 30,034 PB/month, a 22% upward adjustment in just one year. Not surprisingly, Internet video represents the largest single portion of this for the entire forecast period.

For the most part all this is still true, but the full story is not quite so simple. As anyone who follows the CDN space closely knows, service based CDNs don’t make a lot of money delivering video. Margins are small, most CDNs aren’t profitable on their video traffic and all CDN vendors are working hard to diversify their revenue away from video only products.

For video being delivered on-net, or inside the MSO, ISP or carrier network, these kinds of numbers from Cisco are nectar. There is seemingly no end to the growth in video traffic flooding operator networks, so there’s a constant need for products that compress, cache, offload or optimize video traffic, inside the last mile. And since operators are mostly deploying these solutions for cost savings and QoE, with monetization models to follow, vendors that provide these type of platforms inside the network are seeing more growth than service based CDNs.

While it’s true that video is the largest single source of traffic, it’s far from dominant. At one point the report states that “the sum of all forms of video (TV, video on demand [VoD], Internet, and P2P) will be approximately 86% of global consumer traffic by 2016.” However, this number includes a very large portion of traffic such as peer-to-peer for which the underlying content is assumed to be video but the network traffic is a non-streaming form such as a file transfer, which does not lend itself to video compression, optimization or video-only caching.

The portion of consumer Internet traffic that is truly streaming video in 2012 is 57%–still significant but far less than the 86% headline–followed by file sharing at 24%, and web, email and data at 18%. What’s more is that the video portion is forecasted to decline slightly to 54% by 2016 (although it continues to grow in absolute terms). If you look at the market today, video-only tools address at most the 57% (declining to 54%) of the total traffic. Meanwhile P2P traffic tools are not thought of as “video” tools at all, even though most of the time the content they help move is video. It’s a fragmented picture and “80/20” rules do not apply.

We also constantly hear people talk about the growth of mobile data traffic and how mobile is overtaking fixed line traffic. However, according to the VNI numbers, mobile is still a very small fraction of total bits transmitted, comprising 3% today and growing only to 10% by 2016. So while mobile is important, it’s not as big of an opportunity as some make it out to be. In addition, most mobile video consumption takes place over WiFi, not over cellular. Video over 3G and 4G is not taking off as the pricing for these services are far too expensive and carriers have yet to come to the reality that consumers will not pay what they want. Mobile video consumption, especially for long-form video content, is at a stand still not because of technology, but because of the current pricing model and cap limits imposed by carriers.

So what is the implication of all this? From a traffic management perspective, operators need to deal with video but they cannot afford to have a video-only or mobile-only traffic strategy. Operators who want to provide a high quality of experience for their users and maximize offload must deploy solutions that look at the entire scope of content traffic. We tend to gravitate to 80/20 rules because they make our lives simpler, but Cisco’s latest VNI provides a case where the 80/20 rule does not apply. Effective solutions for delivering content need to address the reality of what’s really taking place in the market today and not a simplified story.

In conjunction with our Streaming Media West show, taking place Oct. 30-31 in Los Angeles, we are launching a brand new conference that will focus on video deployments within the enterprise and education verticals.

The new show is called the Enterprise Video Conference and we’ve just launched the website at EnterpriseVideoConference.com and have opened the call for speakers. The call for speakers is only open for 3 weeks and closes August 20th.

The event will he hosted and co-chaired by industry peers from Wells Fargo, Cisco, Lockheed Martin, Accenture, Polycom, Harvard University, and Northwestern University. We’re still working on the advance program for the show, but some of the topics we plan to cover include:

• Enterprise YouTube vs. Managed Video System
• Student-Generated Video on Campus
• Creating an Internal CDN to Support Video Deployments
• Webcasting Tips and Tricks From the Enterprise
• Content Management, Media Management, and Learning Management
• Video and Web Conferencing Infrastructure
• Planning an Enterprise Streaming Media Service
• Lecture Capture Systems and Lifecycle Management
• Developing a Mobile Device Strategy
• The Business Case for Video in the Enterprise
• Building a Enterprise Media Platform
• Multipoint Video Calls and Video Conferencing
• Cloud-Sourced Platforms vs. Internally Hosted Solutions
• Enterprise Live Video Production: Tips and Tricks

While there are plenty of conferences that touch on the subject of video, the Enterprise Video Conference will focus exclusively on the topic of business video, with nearly 75 speakers across 2 days and 20 sessions. The event will also showcase nearly 20 case study presentations from those who have successfully deployed video within their organization. So if you are responsible for deploying video technology and platforms inside your company, please consider doing a 20 minute presentation at the show.

If you want to be considered for a speaking spot, please get your submission in now via the website. If you would like to talk to me about an idea you had, a presentation you want to do, a topic you want to see covered or have any questions about the speaking selection process, call me anytime at 917-523-4562.

Vendors are welcome to submit speaking requests but they MUST also submit with a customer. If you have any questions on this, pick up the phone and call me. If you send in an incomplete speaking submission form, it won’t be considered. I know many vendors want to be involved in the show and if you have any questions at all about speaking, do not wait to reach out to me. Contact me immediately as the speaking spots will full up very quickly. I have already received more than two dozen speaking request from some excellent end-users, so some spots have already been filled.

This isn’t our show, it’s the industry’s and this is your chance to give feedback, pitch in and help make the Enterprise Video Conference showcase that there is more to video than just media and entertainment content. Video deployments inside the enterprise and edu don’t get enough credit and with your help, we can change that.

Over the past few quarters, Adobe has been busy releasing new and updated products and services for content owners that need to create, edit, manage, protect, distribute and monetize video. We’ve seen updates to Production Premium, Adobe Media Server and Adobe Access, amongst others, and I get a lot of questions from people asking how all of Adobe’s products fit into the video ecosystem.

Adobe’s provided me with two slides below that map it all out and make it a bit easy to visualize how their products tie together and what the video ecosystem currently looks like.

There’s more to getting a live event online than just being there with a camera and an encoder. What efficiencies are you overlooking, and how can you ensure the best experience for the widest possible audience at the best price? What’s missing from your toolbox? Join us on August 15th at 2pm ET for this live webinar. Topics to be covered include:

• Importance of delivering the right bit rates to the right devices
• Taking advantage of the medium, multiple camera angles, metadata to highlight key events
• Monetization – Ad insertion across multiple formats and platforms
• Accessibility – Captioning and Multiple languages

Register here and bring your questions for the presenters for the live Q&A portion of the event.

The advance program for the Streaming Media West show, taking place Oct. 30-31 in LA, has been completed. I have included the entire program at the end of this post, or you can download a PDF of it here. In the next week or two it will be added to the West website along with online registration.

If you want to speak or place someone else as a speaker, please look over the agenda and let me know the top (2) sessions you would like to be involved in. Sessions in red are not available and I am no longer accepting any new session proposals. Aside from any last-minute cancellations, the list of session topics and entire agenda is now final. If you are interested in speaker placement for the Enterprise Video Conference, that will open up shortly and I’ll have more details on that soon.

I will no longer hold spots for companies for months at a time. I plan to place speakers much faster than I have in previous years and while I will still be happy to hold spots while you confirm with a speaker or check schedules, I will not hold them indefinitely. Companies that want to be involved are going to have to decide and confirm much faster than previous years. I can’t continue to have companies say they want to speak, but then wait months for them to decide on the details. If you wait until after the summer to decide, I guarantee most spots will be gone.

Whenever I post the advance program I get tons of emails from people who simply reply and say, “I want to speak”. They don’t include any details on who they are, what their background is, what their company does, what topics they can speak to, what previous shows they have spoken at or why they should be selected. Emails like that will be ignored – unless you have spoken at the show in the past and I know who you are. If you want to speak, you must include the details I need to consider you.

If you have any questions about the speaking or selection process, call me (917-523-4562). I am happy to speak to anyone, at anytime, to help make the speaker selection process as easy as possible for you and I always answer and return all calls.

Click on the “continue reading” link to see the advance program.

Continue reading »

Over the weekend I moved my blog to the WordPress platform and in the process, I also checked every single link in all of my posts. I found more than 600 broken links due to vendors changing the directory structure for the site and moving the location of their press releases. While many vendors have re-launched their website with a new look and feel, in the process, quite a few changed the default path to their press releases from something like /press to /media. As a result, all of the previous links to your news are now broken, not just on my blog, but on the hundreds of news sites around the web. For some of the larger vendors that get a lot of news coverage or put out a lot of releases, this adds up to thousands of broken links to your news. Some vendors have re-mapped their old directory structure to default to their home page, but most vendors haven’t even done that, so readers simply get a 404 error.

I spent nearly 15 hours manually fixing all these broken links on my blog by going to each vendors site and finding the new URL, but most blogs and websites aren’t going to take the time to do this, especially the larger ones, which will have the most broken links. So if you’ve recently re-launched your company’s website, please take a look at your directory structure and make sure that previous links to your press releases still work.