Online video: 1 billion users and growing; 57% of consumer online traffic by 2014

How big is online video? A new report from Cisco says that by 2014, TV, VoD, Internet Video, and P2P will exceed 91 percent of global consumer traffic. And, global online video traffic alone will approach 57 percent of consumer Internet traffic, up from the current 40 percent. Even today, it says, the worldwide community of online video users exceeds 1 billion.

Faster broadband has become more available to a broader range of users, Cisco says in its annual Visual Networking Index Forecast, and that has helped lead to a spike in the amount of video being shared across an array of devices. The company said the increasing popularity of HDTV and 3DTV are key factors expected to quadruple IP traffic from 2009 to 2014. With advanced video traffic (including 3D) increasing 13 fold, to make up some 4 percent of all online video traffic, and 42 percent of all consumer online video traffic.

Cisco said the highest IP-traffic generating regions will be North America (19.0 exabytes per month), Asia Pacific (17.4 exabytes per month), Western Europe (16.2 exabytes per month) and Japan (4.3 exabytes per month), with Latin America expected to see the largest growth, of about 51 percent from 2009-2014.

Cisco also predicts that by the end of this year, for the first time in a decade, global Internet video traffic will surpass global peer-to-peer traffic. It will be the first time in the last 10 years that peer-to-peer traffic will not be the largest Internet traffic type.

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