Skytide Blog

Two of the most highly regarded prognosticators of all things Internet-related both weighed in yesterday. The executive summary — all signs continue to bode exceedingly well for online video.

• Cisco published its Visual Networking Index and the numbers are jaw dropping. Consider these predictions for 2017:
  • Online video will represent 69% of consumer internet traffic.
  • Mobile video is really poised to explode, fueled by the seemingly insatiable global consumer appetite for connected devices like smartphones and tablets. Cisco forecasts that mobile video will account for 66% of all mobile data traffic. For perspective, that would be a 16 fold increase from 2012.
  • Internet content streamed to TVs will hit a mind boggling 6.5 exabytes per month. 6.5 exabytes per month!

If these numbers actually pan out, it will require massive infrastructure investments and turn up the heat on network service providers to establish new revenue streams to offset these expenditures.

• Analyst, Mary Meeker also published her oft quoted State of the Web presentation.
  • Particularly interesting to us was her mention of the rise of short-form video, driven by the likes of Vine and Dropcam. Just check out Vine’s surge in active users since the beginning of the year. It will probably surpass your expectations; it definitely exceeded ours.
  • Even so, Skytide is still predicting that the market will also see a surge in long-form video too, as more movies and TV programming are delivered over IP. Check out our 6 Online Video Trends for 2013 report for more insight on the subject.

A few years back, it started to become evident that some seismic shifts were about to transform the way that video content was delivered and consumed. One, that MSOs needed to roll out TV Everywhere initiatives and two, that multi-screen viewing would soon become the norm.

Further evidence that this playing out according to script: today, Time Warner announced that it is adding live out-of-home programming to its TWC TV application, enabling its customers to watch shows on Apple mobile devices like iPhones and iPads.

This TV Everywhere strategy is necessary by the cable companies as a way to deliver programming where, when and how their customers want to consume it and thwart potential cord cutting.

With MSOs like Time Warner pushing video content beyond the TV set to connected devices and telecom companies moving in the other direction — pushing online video content to TV — the landscape can be confusing. Read our presentation below to quickly understand the differences between TV Everywhere and IPTV (and OTT).

YouTube has been floating a trial balloon for the past year that it might launch an online video subscription service.  Today, it announced plans for a paid subscription service to individual YouTube channels that will roll out this spring.

Your initial reaction to that news may be something akin to “there isn’t any content on YouTube that I would pay for.”  But….

• What if the new YouTube Pay TV channels included content from select second-tier and third-tier cable channels?  
• And what if the YouTube channel subscriptions cost just a few bucks a month?  

If you spend a disproportionate amount of your time currently watching the likes of Current TV or The Cooking Channel as part of your monthly cable programming and answered “yes” to the above questions, the new YouTube subscription service may have real appeal.  In fact, it may lead you to pare back to a more basic cable plan (i.e. “cord shaving”) or cut the cord altogether. 

It may make financial sense for the lower tier cable networks to partner with YouTube too.  They currently only receive a sliver of the carriage fees that the network Goliaths like ESPN and MTV command, and they generally occupy undesirable real estate (channel 374 anyone?).

Will some of the niche cable networks run into the willing arms of YouTube? It’s definitely plausible.