Video killed the internet (star)

As Buggles so accurately predicted in 1979, video can cause problems for existing media channels and what was true for the radio star back then is true for the internet now.

This is best explained in this great Guardian article and also here. It seems that the infrastructure that we use to go online (copper wires in most cases) just wasn't built for the levels of data transfer that downloading videos / watching TV online requires. The trend for this type of online content has caused the bandwidth used online to grow exponentially over the last couple of years and as the Guardian reports in 2007 YouTube apparently took up as much bandwidth as the whole internet did in 2000.

The obvious risk of this is that the internet grinds to a halt and that however quick your broadband connection is supposed to be you will only ever achieve dial up speeds, making doing all the stuff we're used to doing online impossible. This could obviously also have a massive impact on government and business as well as individuals. The solution is to replace copper wires with fibre optic cables, but as BT say this could be up to 20 years away in the UK.

I wonder if we'll come to regard bandwidth in the way that we think about energy / green issues now? Don't use any unnecessary bandwidth, do you really need to watch that video again? Does the trend for mobile internet dongles help, after all surely data delivered to these connections is delivered through the air in a kind of magical way, rather than down a copper wire? There are some more articles here and here - I didn't go through the first one in 100% detail, but it uses the word 'Petabytes' which I hadn't heard before and sounds cool.

PS - Apologies for not blogging much recently, I've been shockingly busy, I always think the irony of business blogging is that you probably have most to say when you have the least time to say it.

PPS - Typepad has changed, the good news is that links now open in new windows, the bad news is that it seems strange and clunky, I imagine we'll all get used to it?