Cisco: gigabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, oh my!
June 12, 2009 — Abigail Hamilton
Call me a curmudgeon, but I naturally distrust reports based on research by interested parties.
According to WebTVWire, Cisco’s in-house report indicates that Web video — including Web TV — will dominate the Internet by 2013, making up 2/3 of all traffic. (note my own bold emphasis!):
Cisco, a company that designs and sells networking and communication technology, today released an updated version of its Visual Networking Index. This study looks at how the Internet is likely to grow between now and 2013, and what sectors will be responsible for driving traffic and bandwidth usage.
The research predicts that total IP traffic is set to hit 56 exabytes of data per month by 2013, up from just 9 exabytes of data per month during 2008. This means that annual global IP traffic will exceed two thirds of a zettabyte (1 trillion gigabytes) by that time. Which is going to put a hell of a strain on the system.
I have no doubt that TV is moving onto the Web from many different angles, and that that is a lot of whatever-bytes. But they don’t need to place a strain on networks…innovation is at hand elsewhere than at Cisco to create new, scalable and sophisticated ways of bringing TV onto your computer, without creating broadband network congestion. A solution like ivi TV makes it possible to keep your web-browsing and TV-on-your-PC watching concurrent and equally smooth.
As we’ve said here on the ivi TV blog before, the Web is just not the best platform for TV delivery. And Internet TV doesn’t need to be Browser-based TV. To recap from Todd’s post last week:
Websites simply aren’t good live TV delivery mechanisms. They’re great for relevant video clip delivery and archived video, as websites are easily organized thematically and are searchable.
Live TV, and alpha-state TV viewing, requires channel changing, and most importantly continuously-streamed content. ivi delivers the living room TV experience in a downloadable, stand-alone player. Unlike cumbersome “full-screen only” players (…), the ivi player allows multi-tasking, because it can operate in easily customizable window sizes. Television is coming to every Internet-connected device.
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