VoD is an Epic Waste
I’m not saying the content itself is a waste, though many might promote this characterization. I’m saying that VoD Distribution is an avoidable, epically wasteful consumer of Bandwidth and Infrastructure. Despite the impressive performance improvements in Video Compression Codecs, VoD remains exceptionally wasteful.
The Scope of VoD
For the foreseeable future, Video on Demand [VoD] is expected to grow in market share and in consumed data bandwidth. We might eventually find out just how much video we, as a society can watch and at what point we’ll cry uncle.
Streaming video is by far the top application on the internet. Consumer Internet Video traffic (subscription and otherwise) constitutes >80% of total Internet traffic share. This includes VoD providers Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Paramount+, Disney+, and Apple TV+, with Comcast’s Peacock and AT&T’s Warner/Discovery collective vying to further partition the growing pie.
Of this 80%, less than 15% constitutes streams not inclusive of mainstream subscription services. For the purposes of this conversation, this subset is not applicable to SVoD, as the use cases are dissimilar, and subscriptions are less common. To be blunt, a significant share of this 15% is short-form disinformation and porn. Not to be distracted by this, True SVoD constitutes more than 65% of the Total Internet Network Traffic share.
The comparative statistics on VoD market share, subscribers, use patterns and revenue is a contradictory collection apples and oranges. It’s not instructive to dissect it here. Let’s just say for the year 2021 it represented roughly $60B in annual revenue worldwide, half of which is in the USA
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Hybrid VoD 