As people access the internet over mobile devices they are finding that viewing video in particular is very costly. First, let's look at some data:

VIDEO: 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second. Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day. Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month. Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years. 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US.

Video consumption is exploding, and its global proliferation is straining the very fabric of the internet, particularly at it's wireless edges. What new technologies and approaches to video handling and distribution are coming to keep up with the growth?

The NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament kicks off this week with 32 games in 4 days as part of what is commonly known as March Madness. Since many games are played during standard business hours, employees often attempt to watch games in real-time online while at work. This results in a high consumption of bandwidth sucked up by the streaming video in organizations and can put significant stress on routers, firewalls and other IT security appliances.

We are running out of space on our wireless networks. As a result, mobile providers are trying to slow usage down by incorporating new pricing models and doing away with unlimited plans. Last summer Verizon and AT&T stopped offering unlimited plans to new customers. The reason? Possibly mobile providers were starting to prepare for a future "Spectrum Crunch". The wireless spectrum (infrastructure used to transmit wireless data) is being heavily utilized as more people are purchasing smart phones and using wireless networks to access data.

In a previous article we discussed how techniques in the field of computer vision (CV) can be used to improve video compression, the process by which video content can be represented more compactly than in its original form. Video compression is what enables high-quality video data to be stored and transmitted over limited-capacity networks. By emulating the human visual system in viewing and understanding a video, CV builds models that identify (detect) and follow (track) important content across a series of video frames.

These days, when the average person views video content – whether on a smartphone, tablet, HDTV, or theater screen – there are two common questions that come to mind: “How is the quality?” and “Did I get it fast enough?” If you think about it, though, those two goals oppose each other:  high quality video content requires more data, but transmitting video content over limited-capacity networks requires less data.

There is a big problem happening right now with video consumption across all devices and we continue to overlook it everyday. Even though we are promised the latest in HD technology and the fastest internet speeds, our videos are still pixelated and we spend way too much time ‘buffering.’ The solution however, requires a major shift in behind the scenes delivery of these videos.

Forty  percent of all consumer internet traffic is video. If you haven’t noticed, blogs, news and entertainment sites are trying to create as much video as possible. It’s more engaging, it’s more emotional, and it attracts audience. But there’s a lot more to hosting video and ensuring that it’s delivered in high definition than just publishing it on a website, however. With 90% of all web traffic predicted to be video based by 2015, one Concord based company is preparing to revolutionize the way video gets delivered to the internet.