In the next two years, there will be an industry shakeout. First, we predict that ten companies in our market will exit the business, voluntarily or involuntarily, because of business model weakness. Next, in 2017, emerging technologies will create massive disruption (and opportunity) in how video is delivered and consumed.
Some believe Apple Web TV will cause massive disruption when it comes out. Others believe it will be 4k, VP9, HVEC or AWS. These technologies are not game changers, but incremental boosters to the way video is delivered and consumed. AWS is a cloud platform that facilitates the ingest, storage and transcode of video files, but it falls short in the delivery department.
The same goes for Akamai. It’s not their fault, its the last mile infrastructure that’s in place. Once the next-gen last mile connectivity comes to fruition in 2017, everything changes. GPON, 5G, Next-gen DOCSIS, and other similar last mile innovations will completely alter the video market. And its not years away as some perceive, but it is two years away.
Today, the innovation available in cameras and TV sets is astounding. For example, 6k Red Dragon takes filming to a whole new level. On the TV front, numerous manufacturers offer feature packed 4k TV’s with all the bells and whistles including UDR and HDR. Thus, the technology is in place today to create and consume 4k video. In two years, it is likely to be 6k or 8k. The main challenge preventing streaming of 4k is the first mile, middle mile and last mile bottlenecks. But those bottlenecks will start to disappear in 2017, as 5G enters the marketplace (via Verizon) and next-gen optical networks become mainstream.
In 2017, three network bottlenecks will be eliminated
- First Mile Bottleneck: Minimized as companies move their apps to the cloud. Thus, first mile bandwidth bottleneck moves to the middle mile
- Middle Mile Bottlenecks: The deployment of next-gen network technologies, including 100G and private WAN networks (Google, Facebook, etc) drastically increase amount of traffic the Internet backbone is capable of carrying
- Last Mile Bottleneck: GPON, 5G, DOCSIS, and so on, reduce last mile bottleneck constraints, whereby consumers can consume 4k, 6k, 8k and whatever else suits their fancy
