Online videos continue to gain
May 12th, 2008 by Benjamin KuoComscore is reporting today that online video views grew to 11.5 billion views during the month of March, up 13 percent from February, and a 64 percent year to year gain. Most of those views — not a surprise — come from Google, and its popular YouTube video sharing site. 38% of the video market is represented by Google. The next most popular site for videos was Fox Interactive Media (namely, MySpace) which had 4.2 percent of the views for March.
Aside from the continuing domination of Google, I find it interesting that more and more of the ISPs and bandwidth providers I speak to out at conferences and events tell me that video now represents a huge majority of the traffic they deal with on a regular basis. Video has overtaken HTTP (web) protocol traffic as what they watch, tune their networks for, and gauge in order to plan and manage their networks.
The telecom folks I talk to tell me that this growth in video traffic has helped to fill what had been very empty (and expensive) pipes, which had been overbuilt during the dot com boom. Although it looks like there’s still lots of un-used capacity out there in the world (I haven’t seen anybody building new capacity nowadays — mostly just buying up unused telecomassets), it should be interesting to see if the increase in content and use of video online will help spur another surge in the telecommunications and equipment provider market, as we finally grow past the latent capacity available today.
