Online Video to Make Up 86 Percent of Internet Traffic in 2016

The medium is projected to make up 54 percent of online traffic by 2016. When you factor in traffic for P2P distribution of videos, that number jumps to 86 percent, according to Cisco's Visual Networking Index, last updated in May. The report expects annual global IP traffic to number 1.3 zettabytes by the end of 2016, surpassing the zettabyte -- that's 21 zeroes behind a one -- threshold for the first time. 

 

A growing segment of that traffic can be attributed to online video. Cisco expects users to upload 3 trillion minutes -- that's more than 6 billion years -- each month; put another way, that's 1.2 million minutes of video uploaded each second.

 

Video-on-demand traffic is expected to see a large uptick, tripling by 2016. That's an equivalent of 4 billion DVDs each month. High-definition content is expected to make up 79 percent of these videos. In the year 2016, audiences won't be watching only cat videos. The report projects traffic from long-form online video to be 5.3 times heavier than short-form videos. This fact corresponds with VideoMind’s Video Index, which found people spent half their online viewing time on long-form content measuring at least 10 minutes.

 

If that seems like a lot of stress on broadband connections, no need to fret. Average global Internet speeds are expected to grow almost four-fold to 34 Mbps in 2016, up from 9.1 Mbps in 2011. Cisco expects 175 million households to account for more than 50 gigabytes of data each month, six million of which will generate more than a terabyte each month. Mobile connections are likewise expected to be a lot speedier, reaching 2,873 kbps in 2016, a nine-fold increase from 2011.