In 8 Years, Online Video Consumption Will be Measured in Exabytes
One exabyte is a billion gigabytes. It's one quintillion bytes. And yes, “quintillion” is a number so large, it almost seems made-up. But that's how much online video will be consumed by 2017, according to new reports from U.K.-based research firm Coda.
Context & Ripple Effects
This forecast lands eight months after NewTeeVee measured a 40% single-year jump in time spent watching video — Coda's job here is converting that behavioral growth curve into a hard network number: one exabyte (a billion gigabytes) of annual online video consumption by 2017.
It matters because exabyte-scale figures stop being curiosities once research houses publish them: they become the shared planning vocabulary between video publishers, delivery networks, and the carriers footing the transit bill. Coda, a U.K.-based firm best known in this corpus for the forecast itself, is staking its research brand on quantifying that shift.
First-order effects
- Online video publishers gain a quantified demand curve to plan against — Coda's 2017 target translates the 2008–09 surge in viewing hours into a concrete delivery volume that determines their bandwidth budgets.
- Carriers and delivery-network operators receive a headline figure they can fold directly into capacity roadmaps, replacing ad-hoc estimates of video's share of traffic.
Second-order effects
- As video dominates traffic mixes, the gap widens between flat-rate consumer access pricing and per-gigabit delivery costs, forcing CDN and transit providers toward video-weighted contracts.
- Ad-supported video services face a structural squeeze: revenue scales with views while delivery cost scales with bytes, making compression and encoding efficiency a competitive lever.
Third-order effects
- If forecasts at this scale hold, traffic volume displaces user counts and session metrics as the industry's primary unit of planning — and the methodology behind exabyte projections becomes something research firms must defend publicly.
- Sustained exabyte-scale demand pushes infrastructure economics toward purpose-built video delivery layers rather than general-purpose web infrastructure.
The trend: Internet-scale forecasting is upgrading its units from gigabytes to exabytes as video becomes the dominant payload of consumer broadband.