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April - 2013 - issue > View Point

3 Mobile Video Trends to Watch in 2013

Nitin Bhandari
Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder-Skyfire
Monday, April 1, 2013
Nitin Bhandari
Founded in 2007, Skyfire is a cloud solutions mobility company. The Mountain View based company funded by Panorama Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures and Verizon Ventures was recently acquired by Opera software, the Norwegian web browser developer.

Anyone paying attention to the mobile space the past several years has watched a confluence of forces bring about rapid changes in focus for operators, device makers and network hardware and software makers. My own company, Skyfire, has ridden the wave from feature phones to smartphones; from 2G to 3G to 4G; from spotty and hard-to-find Wi-Fi to nearly ubiquitous WiFi in the home, office and elsewhere; and from low-bandwidth consumer data consumption to an unprecedented surge in bandwidth-clogging, network-threatening over the top (OTT) video. From my vantage point, having been so close to this space for so many years, I can see three key trends that all links in the mobile chain should keep an eye out for in 2013:

The Surge In Mobile Video Usage Won't Let Up

While Cisco's oft-quoted 2013 Visual Networking Index evoked some chirping due to some slight downward revisions, it still showed that global mobile data traffic grew by 70 percent in 2012 alone, reaching 885 petabytes per month (up from 550 petabytes/month in 2011). 50 percent of network bandwidth was video, and Cisco projects that will grow to 66 percent of all consumed bandwidth by 2017. Ericsson's similar study was more aggressive, showing global mobile data traffic doubling during the same period. Even subjective and anecdotal information shows just how central video usage on smartphones and tablets is becoming: larger screens, more 3G- and LTE-connected tablets; more content providers; and a generation coming online for the first time on mobile devices first, rather than desktop computers.

SDN and the Cloud to become Core to Network Strategy


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