Video Represents 99% of Consumer Information Consumption

Reduced to bytes, U.S. consumers in 2008 imposed an information transfer "load" of about 34 gigabytes a day, say Roger E. Bohn, director, and James E. Short, research direction of the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California, San Diego. That works out to about seven DVDs worth of data a day.

And that isn't even the most-significant potential implication. We are used to hearing about consumption of media or information in terms of "time," such as hours consumed each day. But Bohn and Short also look at information flows in terms of "bandwidth."

If one looks at consumption based on the "hours of use," video accounts for possibly half of total daily consumption.

If one looks at the flows in terms of compressed bytes, or actual bandwidth required to deliver the information, then video represents 99 percent of the flow volume.

That has huge implications for the design of any nation's communications and "broadcasting" networks. To the extent that virtually all information now is coded in digital form, a shift of consumption modes (from watching linear satellite, cable or telco TV to Internet delivery) can have huge effects.

Recall that video bits now represent 99 percent of bandwidth load. But also note that most of that load is delivered in the most-efficient way possible, by multicasting a single copy of any piece of information to every potential consumer all at once. It requires no more bandwidth to serve up an event watched by 500 million people than one person.

That is why video and audio networks historically have been designed as "mutlicast" networks. They are the most effiecient way of delivering high-bandwidth information.

If more video starts to move to Internet delivery, the bandwidth requirements literally explode. To deliver one identical piece of content to 500 million Internet users requires 500 million times as much bandwidth as the "old" multicast method, in at least the access link. If network architects are ruthlessly efficient and can cache such content at the edge of the network, wide area bandwidth consumption is reduced and the new load is seen primarily on the access networks.

All of this suggests a rational reason for maintaining "multicast" video entertainment networks, and not shifting all consumption to unicast Internet delivery. It is extremely inefficient and wasteful of network resources. To the extent that much "on demand" viewing of popular professional content can be satisifed by local storage (digital video recorders), this should be done.

On-demand viewing of YouTube content is harder to rationalize in that manner. For the same reason, local storage of computer games, where possible, makes sense. Interactive, "live" gaming does not allow such offloading, and will contribute hugely to Internet bandwidth demand, just as viewing of YouTube videos is doing.

“Information," representing flows of data delivered to people from 20 sources, is likely to be much higher the next time the researchers replicate the study, because television, which accounts for nearly half of total consumption, now has shifted from analog NTSC to high-definition, which imposes a greater information load.

Television consumption represents about 41 percent of the daily consumption, but computer and video games represent 55 percent of the flow. Add ratio and TV and those two sources represent 61 percent of the flow.

But there is another important implication: the researchers counted "compressed" information, or "bandwidth," in addition to more-familiar metrics such as hours of consumption.

Looked at in this way, the researchers say, "led to a big surprise." In fact, only three activities--television, computer games and movies account for 99 percent of the flow. All other sources, including books, mobile or fixed voice, newspapers, radio or music, contribute only one percent of total load.

The researches also point out that they count bytes as part of the  "information flow" only when users actually consume the information. Data stored on hard drives or TV or radio signals not being watched or listened to does not count in the research methodology.

The researchers also point out that if “personal conversation” is considered a source of information, then high-quality "tele-presence" applications that actually mimic talking to a person in the same room would require about 100 Mbps worth of communications load.

Three hours of personal conversation a day at this bandwidth would be 135 gigabytes of information, about 400 percent more than today's average consumption.