Better Video Compression is Key to Stemming the "Exaflood"

A recent white paper from Cisco has everybody talking again about the role of video in the coming IP data “exaflood.”

In the paper, Cisco predicts that worldwide IP traffic will surpass half a zettabyte (522 exabytes to be exact) by 2012. Previous reports on the same theme have been published by The Discovery Institute and IDC.

Cisco also estimates that, “The sum of all forms of video (TV, VoD, Internet, and P2P) will account for close to 90 percent of consumer traffic by 2012. Internet video alone will account for nearly 50 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2012.”

Think about that: 470 of the 522 exabytes of data traversing the tubes in 2012 will be video.

Whether or not the Internet can handle this volume of data is still under debate. But what if even marginally better video compression could decrease that figure by, say, 20%?

That would translate to a savings of over 94 exabytes per year. That’s 100,931,731,456 gigabytes.

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that all bandwidth in 2012 will be sold at one very low price: $0.05 per gigabyte.

Our theoretical 20% reduction in bandwidth would mean a savings of $5,046,586,572 per year.

To anybody except the U.S. government, that’s a lot of money. And of course the likelihood of all bandwidth, everywhere, costing $0.05/GB is slim.

Consider also that NHK Japan has been hard at work since 2003 developing Super Hi-Vision (UHDV), a video format that uses 16 times more data than today’s 1080p HD. Their goal is to begin broadcasting UHDV in 2015.

Constant innovation in compression will be essential to manage the explosion in IP video. At On2 Technologies, our proprietary technology empowers us to develop codecs that have consistently stayed ahead of the standard formats. For example, our next format, On2 VP8, will offer better quality than H.264 and VC-1 using as much as 50% less data.