It’s kind of scary seeing my mug on John’s post from the 27^th about GIPS mobile offerings.  However, as has been widely published in sources like Engadget, Gizmodo and the New York Times, there has been a crack in Apple’s normally impenetrable veil of secrecy around new product developments with the exposure of a prototype of Apple’s next generation iPhone.  The fact that the device has a front facing camera is the best response to the piece covered in John’s post.

A frequent criticism of Apple is that they don’t do anything that revolutionary.  It is that claim that makes Apple’s success all the more spectacular and game-changing.  Portable .mp3 players existed long before the iPod, but Apple’s entry changed not only the company, but the entire industry.  Similarly, the iPhone and the iPad were neither the first smart phone nor the first tablet PC on the market, but their introduction and resulting success have changed their markets significantly.  With the iPhone, hundreds of thousands of applications have proliferated, creating a whole new market for applications developers (historically a weakness for Apple).  Adding voice and video to some of these applications will enrich the experience for the end user.  To be sure, mobile video conferencing is again not a new category, as AT&T introduced video share about three years ago.  However, the service was not very usable and the device support was not where it needed to be.  However, with the introduction of frame-by-frame access to the camera which is included in iPhone OS 4 and the front facing camera which appears to be part of the 4G design, Apple will be poised once again to change the game with mobile video conferencing.

Now, no discussion of the leak would be complete without mention of the heavy handed response of Apple and the local authorities against Gizmodo and the individual who found the lost device.  However, coverage of that topic should be left to the professionals…or at least the fake professions at The Daily Show: 

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.

Cisco’s new video over IP push has been all over the media lately, e.g. the article by Jim Duffy of Network World or Peter Burrow’s post in BusinessWeek. The concept is called MediaNet and includes media (video) aware network elements such as “The Media Experience Engine 3000 (MXE 3000) is a processing platform that sits between an enterprise switch and router and is designed to simplify media sharing across the network by optimizing its delivery in any format for any device. It provides media conversion, real-time post production, editing, formatting, and network distribution for businesses developing targeted visual communications, Cisco says.”

This rings bells from the early days of Voice over IP. Cisco drove Voice over IP because of the traffic on the net and the need for quality networks, Cisco is in the business of selling network equipment. One interesting thing with voice is that it increased the number of packets on the network a lot, Voice over IP calls are typically relatively low bandwidth with many small packets to keep latency down. Routers, switches, etc  handle packets so the need for such network equipment increased. Cisco has also shipped more than 18 million IP phones since 1999.

Video on the other hand is much more bandwidth intensive than voice, also a driver for more network equipment and more advanced network equipment.  Cisco driving Video over IP is in my mind a good thing for the IP communications industry overall and video applications in particular.

Cisco pushing something creates opportunities!