A range of technological innovations, combined with rapid developments of new platforms, products and services, are disrupting the digital media landscape.  Significant changes have been observed in the way video is produced, distributed, consumed and archived.  These changes have a profound impact on the way we record, share, communicate and make sense of the world around us.

Today, video is not simply an important part of the online experience.  Increasingly, video is the internet.  Within the next few years the overwhelming majority of internet traffic will be video.  According to Cisco, global consumer internet video traffic will make up 80% of all consumer internet traffic by 2019, up from 64% in 2014.  This percentage does not include videos exchanged through peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing.  The sum of all forms of video [including TV, video on demand (VoD), Internet, and P2P] will be 80-90% of global consumer traffic, which means that every second, nearly one million minutes of video content will be shared across the network by 2019.

 A particularly significant trend is the explosive growth of social video – a trend that is projected to accelerate further in the next few years.  Video viewing on Facebook grew  very rapidly from 4 billion views per day in April 2015 to 8 billion per day in November 2015, the equivalent of over 500 million daily users. On Snapchat, video viewing  exceeded 6 billion per day by November 2015, tripling the daily viewing figure recorded in May 2015.  YouTube has over one billion users, which is about one third of the  global internet population; and each day, people watch hundreds of millions of hours of video, making it the second most popular search engine in its own right, surpassed  only by its big brother, Google.  More importantly, the emergence of new ways of creating and consuming video, whether YouTube’s 360 Player or the forthcoming release  of virtual reality kit Oculus Rift by Facebook in early 2016, will promise a world of video that is more immersive and engaging, opening up new possibilities for business applications aimed at delivering unique user experiences.