It is a well known fact that video is the dominant and fastest growing source of traffic on mobile broadband networks. The Cisco® Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010-2015 published in February 2011 predicts that video will comprise 50% of all mobile traffic in 2011 and exceed 66% of traffic by 2015 . This trend is accelerating in part due to the rapid rise in purchases of smartphones and mobile enabled tablet devices with high resolution displays and the availability of high speed mobile broadband services.
What is not widely discussed or analyzed is the growing concentration of video traffic into fewer distribution points (video oriented websites, mobile video applications…) and into a smaller number of highly popular videos. It is true that the ever-growing list of video-oriented websites and do-it-yourself video uploading services creates a "long-tail" of video content. For example, over 20 million videos are uploaded to Facebook every month. While this "long tail" is likely to grow longer and comprise more diverse content, what is also occurring is that the traffic volume is concentrating in a smaller percentage of the most-popular videos that are viewed over and over. This trend in concentration of video content is evident in some compelling statistics, including most recently the U.S. Super Bowl Championship on February 6th, 2011, which generated over 20 million viewings of the Volkswagen: Darth Vader advertisement on YouTube in just 6 days. This included over 2.8M viewings from mobile devices. In addition, the top requested BBC iPlayer show in 2010 ("Dr. Who" episode 1) was streamed 2.2 million times, while Netflix in the U.S. represents 20% of the primetime internet traffic on any given day.
In addition to these industry statistics, our investigations into mobile broadband traffic patterns illustrate this trend clearly.
| Summary results from Backhaul traffic study of an HSPA network: |
| 2009 |
10% of video objects |
40% of video traffic |
| 2010 |
10% of video objects |
65% of video traffic |
| 2009 |
1% of website domains |
60% of video traffic |
| 2010 |
1% of website domains |
90% of video traffic |
We believe there are several market factors driving the video concentration trend in mobile broadband, including:
- Rapid adoption of high-definition video screens on smartphone and mobile tablet devices
- More professional videos from traditional media outlets targeting mobile users - higher quality, highly promoted
- Long form content - Movies, TV shows, sports
- Short form content - Webisodes, news clips, music videos
- Online Advertising - highly repeated, short clips, embedded in other content
- Promotion of popular videos (rapid feedback loops)
- "Top Video" lists from sites like YouTube, BBC, CNN, Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon, and LOVEFilm
- Video-specific applications for devices that concentrate content (Netflix application on iPad, BBC iPlayer application…)
- Social Networks promote video sharing that creates "Flash" events with multiple streams of the same video. The Volkswagen: Darth Vader video was referred by Facebook users over 4M times.
These important trends suggest there may be ways of exploiting video traffic concentration to better design and optimize mobile broadband networks. Technologies such as video caching, content distribution networks (CDNs) and adaptive content optimization will become more effective at reducing the effect of video growth on network congestion and customer experience. In addition, mobile operators need to evolve their networks and services to better support high quality, high demand video services by developing smarter distribution networks.