The collective CDN market will grow to just shy of $60 billion by 2029, as the volume of video traffic delivered climbs to 17,985 exabytes annually. Spurred by the adoption of HTTP/3 and QUIC, the developing Media over QUIC (MoQ) transport standard will begin to emerge, while alternative CDN approaches begin chipping away at the stalwart Public and Private CDN categories.

The CDN market is reaching a tipping point, where the unrelenting growth of video traffic will force some significant rethinks about network architecture and commercial practices.

This is the crux of the issue:

• Video traffic is still relentlessly surging upwards.
• Consumers still expect the best quality of service.
• Consumer discretionary spending is depressed.
• The additional volume of traffic that must be accommodated when broadcast video infrastructure is sunset is still unknown.
• Post-covid economic conditions are not favorable to capital investment.
• Regulators are not convinced (with good reason) of the ‘fair share’ argument.
• Operators are almost institutionally incapable of innovating their way out of a problem.
• They are far too dependent on vendors (across the stack, not just in CDN) to solve their problems – and large vendors are now bloated and debt-ridden.
• Operators have done a poor job of building network infrastructure when it was cheap to do so (post-2008, pre-covid).
• They have not properly leveraged their dark fiber assets.
• They have not replaced copper quickly enough (where applicable).
• Forays into cellular have focused on MVNO deals, rather than challenging the MNOs.

If you’re an Operator, this report will help you to refine your thinking on these challenges and offers practical strategies for different scenarios and use cases.  CDN Vendors will learn of new business opportunities and acquisition targets. Players in the subscription and ad-based VoD markets will learn the scope of this opportunity, with the potential for each single stream to be profitable in ad-centric business models.

The report includes discussions on: 

• Public and Private CDN, WebRTC-based CDN, Decentralized CDN
• Architectures
• The Current Commercial Landscape
• Future Trends, including Open Caching, Telco CDN, Media over QUIC (MoQ) & HTTP/3, WebRTC, Edge Compute & Mobile Applications, and ‘Fair Share’
• Key Players and Technology Vendors

The report also includes an XLS dataset of numbers you can drop straight into your business case:

• CDN Traffic and Revenue to 2029 of Public and Private CDN, WebRTC-based CDN, Decentralized CDN, Open Caching, Live and Non-Live
• All broken out by region: North America, LatAm, Europe, APAC, ME&A

Some key questions answered in this report:

• What happens when the Open Caching and/or Telco CDN trends properly take home, with CDN vendors agreeing deals with ISPs to place their caching infrastructure inside the ISP networks?
• If emerging CDN technologies significantly reduce the number of units delivered, via optimized caching, how will this affect the value of the market?
• How does the increased prevalence of advertising in VoD factor in?

If you’re a video stakeholder navigating the changing shape of video traffic, contact us now to discuss a purchase of this report. Subscribers can login for full access.