British Telecom (BT), the behemoth telecom company and one of the largest communications companies in the world want to charge video websites for carrying their content. “We can’t give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect,” said John Petter, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer business in a Financial Times interview.

Petter added that content providers were “developing very profitable business models” with products that had free use of BT’s networks, but at the same time, adding significant costs to BT’s business. BT is now throttling consumers’ bandwidth during peak hours “in order to optimize the experience for all customers.”

Whether this means BT will seek payments from the like of Google and BBC is another matter but what the issue does bring up is video demands are growing exponentially online. Regardless of whether it’s streaming or real-time, new business models will likely develop, which considers the amount of data and video that we use.

In a recent report Cisco reports that IP traffic will quintuple from 2008-2013, at which point video will make up over 90 percent of Internet traffic. Here are some of the Cisco forecasts below:

Real-time video is growing in importance. By 2013, Internet TV will be over 4 percent of consumer Internet traffic, and ambient video will be 8 percent of consumer Internet traffic. Live TV has gained substantial ground in the past few years: globally, P2P TV is now slightly over 7 percent of overall P2P traffic at over 200 petabytes per month.

Video communications traffic growth is accelerating. Though still a small fraction of overall Internet traffic, video over instant messaging and video calling are experiencing high growth. Video communications traffic will increase tenfold from 2008 to 2013.

Almost 64 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2013. Mobile video will grow at a CAGR of 150 percent between 2008 and 2013.

Globally, mobile data traffic will double every year through 2013, increasing 66x between 2008 and 2013. Mobile data traffic will grow at a CAGR of 131 percent between 2008 and 2013, reaching over 2 exabytes per month by 2013.