YouTube Business Chief Expects Digital Video Force To Awaken, Crush TV Empire By 2020

It should strike no one as a surprise that digital video has become big business. Let be more accurate; it's a huge business. When Google purchased YouTube almost ten years ago, there were few people who truly understood what it'd become. Today it's one of the most popular websites on the planet, ranking 3rd globally (behind Google.com and Facebook.com). It's also no doubt responsible for a lot more bandwidth than most other sites out there, so it's of little surprise then that the company's Chief Business Officer sees a bright future.

At CES, Robert Kyncl reiterated a couple of predictions he made four years ago, which he still believes will hold true. At that event in 2012, he claimed that by 2020, 90% of all Internet traffic would be related to video. Current trends actually show that this prediction could be beat by a year.

Kyncl also said that by 2020, 75% of all video content would be enjoyed via the Internet, not a cable TV service. That claim seems ambitious, but as our Internet gets faster, and our bandwidth allowances become more lenient (for many, at least), it's not hard to understand why this would be the case.

Even today, most cable TV offerings have us trapped. We need to watch a show when a network wants to show it. Meanwhile, services like YouTube and Netflix give us the convenience of being able to watch anything we want on our time, and with the utmost of ease. There's no reason to believe that anything will change; instead, we'll continue on this trajectory to see digital content consumption increase, with more and more "cutting the cord". For those who've already done so, things should only get better, as content producers will be forced to offer their currently-exclusive cable TV content online.

The future of video is definitely going to be interesting to "watch".