2013 Online Video Executive Prediction: Limelight Networks

The world is speeding up thanks to social media, 4G LTE, and always-on devices. And video is in the thick of this new mobile world.

I won’t go into why video is growing but mobile has a lot to do with it. Look at Cisco’s 2012 VNI Forecast -- 120 Exabytes of annual mobile data by 2016. 65% video. Wow.

More video to more places equals more complex workflows. Between format and delivery, 2013 promises some serious headaches for video publishing. Although users are willing to deal with a little more latency on mobile, they still want it HD and want it now. And even though HTTP will win the war, different versions and codecs require that publishers provide all versions. We’ve talked with major media brands. They want to get rid of those headaches, especially for live video which is growing significantly (MLB just announced 334% year-over-year growth for live viewers).

2013 will see workflow consolidation -- video management, transcoding covering all the new HTTP formats and devices, ad insertion, etc. Why? Because a more efficient workflow for video publishing lets publishers focus on content creation that this faster world demands but with peace-of-mind that it will get everywhere to every device. And the consolidation is already happening -- Brightcove acquiring Zencoder, Wowza offering live transcoding, and Adobe Media Server 4.5 outputting HLS.

Beyond 2013? Smarter video. Contextual video. Better use of analytics to drive engagement. But there’s definitely no going back. Video is the future of how businesses tell stories.

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