June 9, 2009

Soon, there will be so much video on the Web we'll be talking about "zettabytes"

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Fueled by the insatiable demand for Web-based video (including those such as YouTube's immensely popular "Monster From the Deep" clip and archived television shows found on Hulu), global Internet traffic will get nearly four times larger over the next four years. By the end of 2013, the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs worth of information will cross the Net monthly, according to a report issued today by Cisco Systems, the company that sells much of networking gear on which the Internet runs.

If this prediction holds true, it would take more than half a million years to watch all the online video that crosses the Internet in just a single month by 2013, the company reports.

Cisco needed a relatively new term to quantify that traffic: "two-thirds of a zettabyte," or 667 "exabytes." (A zettabyte is measure of computer storage or memory equal to one trillion gigabytes, TechCrunch reports. One gigabyte can hold about 341 digital pictures or about 256 MP3 audio files.)

Cisco forecasts that video files will be part of 90 percent of all consumer Internet traffic (that generated by households, universities, and Internet cafés) in 2013. Video will also play a much larger role in mobile computing, according to the company, which predicts that 64 percent of Internet traffic accessed via laptops, smart phones and other mobile devices will include video within four years.

Of course, the veracity of the report's results require increasingly more powerful PCs, laptops and mobile phones, the expansion of mobile and fixed broadband networks (Cisco's strength), and software for greater compression of large multimedia files to keep video from being a burden to Internet use.

The company's report comes one day after Apple announced that its next iPhone, called the 3G S, will be able to record, edit and send video clips (via e-mail or multimedia message service, MMS). iPhone 3G S users will also be able to upload an iPhone video to YouTube using voice commands, the Washington Post reports.
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