Fueled by the growth in broadband access to the Net, the number of video streams increased nearly 81% in 2004, reaching 14.2 billion (with a “b”) streams. Accustream, which measures such things, expects growth to continue on the same curve this year, with some 21 billion streams (an increase of almost 50%) forecast for 2005. By 2007, the annual volume of video streams is expected to surpass 35 billion.

The adoption of broadband by consumers is also expected to keep increasing, meaning the Web is growing more and more multimedia. The value of video or audio, beyond the obvious, is that is is becoming a consumer expectation. It won’t be long before sites without audio or video will be seen as (as my daughter puts it) so 15 minutes ago.

Source: ClickZ Stats