The growth in online video, both in popularity and the number of services available, has been great to see. And it’s likely to carry on in the same vein for years to come. However, could sites such as YouTube, Hulu, and the BBC iPlayer end up slowing down the Web?
From Bad To Worse?
Depending on where you live, the type of Internet connection you have got, and the terms your ISP enforces, that image to the right could be a regular occurrence for you. As it stands, the Internet can slow down at times to make loading heavy-graphic Web pages or transferring files a very pedestrian affair.
However, it could be about to get a lot worse, if new research to be published later this year is to be believed. Internet brownouts could become very regular happenings, and online video is being touted as one of the main reasons behind it.
A Internet brownout would see people suddenly finding their computer unusable online as the level of traffic went beyond the current infrastructure. At the moment, consumer demand is thought to be growing at around 60 percent a year, which if sustained or increased could see brownouts start to show up as early as 2010.
Online Video To Blame
Online video is being blamed for this, along with an increased number of people working from home and using the Internet to do so. Nemertes Research claim that the problems could begin next year, with 2012 marking the time when the Internet becomes nothing more than an “unreliable toy”.
Online video is growing at an almost exponential rate. YouTube alone now accounts for as much Internet traffic as the whole of the Web did in the year 2000. Then there are video-on-demand services cropping up all over the place, with Hulu in the U.S. and the BBC iPlayer in the UK being of particular interest.
If the bandwidth demands of online video are bad now, then it’s only likely to get worse. Not only are more people using their computers to watch television on over the Web, but content is increasingly being offered in high-definition, which can up the demands placed on the system four-fold.
Conclusions
The infrastructure is being updated around the world in order to make this dystopian future not become reality. However, super-fast fiber-optic cables are unlikely to be laid quick enough to keep up with the demand. And even if they are then rural areas are still likely to experience problems.
This may just be scaremongering of the highest order but it cannot be denied that the demands being placed on the Internet are increasing all the time, especially when it comes to delivering HD video content over the Web.
[Via Times Online]
