The Top Trends of 2019
From the potential of 5G to the power of AI and more, our connected lives are being shaped by the growth of transformative technologies. Powerful on their own, these transformative technologies are now converging to change fundamentally how we interact with the world, how we do business, and even how we communicate with each other. As this convergence continues, formerly separate industries are intersecting in new ways, with new opportunities (and challenges) emerging. Evolution of transformative technologies: Market and technology capabilities continuously drive innovation Transformative technologies enable shifts in how enterprises function and how individuals live everyday life. As technologies become smarter and more sophisticated, and as markets evolve, transformation can begin in new industries. The rate at which we see these technologies take hold has grown rapidly in recent years. Major trends for 2019 Trend 1: Video Everywhere Video’s increasing ubiquity is forcing significant industry change as a growing number of players vie for consumer attention and revenue, and businesses adapt to cope with the rising demand. Driving forces for Video Everywhere trend include the rise of online offerings and platforms, including those from powerful new market entrants; increasing penetration of mobile connected devices capable of capturing and displaying video; advances in network and transmission technologies for sharing it; and the resultant explosion of user-generated content and social video. The trend affects not only media sectors such as TV, home entertainment, social media and games, which are at its heart, but other industries including security, education and healthcare as well that are becoming increasingly reliant on video technology. However, the Video Everywhere trend poses certain challenges that need to be resolved. Infrastructure, network capacity, and user experience Challenge: Current generation network infrastructure is not equipped to support the rapid rise in video traffic. Solution: Next-generation network investment is essential for supporting a reliable, high-quality user experience for a mass user base. 5G will be transformative for video, introducing the massive mobile broadband that will enable streaming of professional video and user-generated content at scale. Content and monetization Challenge: Service providers, broadcasters and platforms competing for a share of video revenues need the right mix of quality content, an expensive commodity that can be difficult to effectively monetize for a good return on investment. Solution: Investment in programming, whether exclusive or acquired, should be proportionate to a video provider’s ambitions and serve clear strategic objectives. Content services, features, and video-specific network access can all be monetized to varying degrees, but video can also serve bigger-picture goals. For telcos and bigtech firms, in particular, it attracts users to a bundle of services that collectively drive revenue and EBIDTA growth and boost customer stickiness. Video should therefore be positioned as a primary tool for elevating the overall value proposition. Privacy and data protection Challenge: Increasing video capture in daily life – whether from smartphones, wearable devices, drones, or satellites – will result in more and more images of private citizens being gathered, stored, and potentially shared. Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, meanwhile, are enabling facial-recognition-based identification, potentially putting people’s privacy at risk. Solution: Governments and regulators must play a key role in protecting citizens, putting the appropriate policy, legislation, and tools in place to prevent breaches of privacy and data protection. Strategies of consolidated media and telco players to take shape in 2019 Fuelled in part by a fear of the threat posed by the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple, a spate of significant M&A activity in the media and telecoms industries has seen key players merge and expand. The impact of major deals involving AT&T and Time Warner, Disney and Fox, Vodafone and Liberty Global, and Comcast and Sky, respectively, will begin to become apparent in 2019, as the strategies of newly enlarged industry leaders take shape. Trend 2: The Edge The Edge broadly refers to processing traditionally performed in a cloud environment that is now being run closer to either the sensor data or the human-machine interface. It is changing the way networks are being deployed and devices are being built, plus enabling new revenue streams as compute resources are available closer to the end consumer. Driving forces for the Edge trend include – the top edge application is video content delivery; real-time or low er latency for time-critical workloads or safety applications; resiliency for situations where the network connection is not optimal or offline; data aggregation and the ability to filter in order to balance storage, networking, and compute; and security and privacy functionality centralized and enhanced – particularly in the IoT domain where end nodes might not be capable. The trend affects service providers, cloud providers, and IoT companies that are particularly centered in the edge discussion. The edge also impacts the entire value chain from semiconductor providers through OEMs to segments like media, security and gaming. The evolution of edge The emerging edge is a new and powerful set of locations for handling applications, and the edge can be anywhere. For example, a connected car is an edge on wheels. With so many target locations possible, some edge solutions will be built to handle less data for fewer users while others will be large and handle massive datasets for many users, including data centers distributed around a metropolitan area. New low-power, specialized chips will power edge devices, and while many people equate the edge with 5G, the edge and edge apps exist today, yet there have been very few 5G deployments to date. As the IoT universe expands to include more devices – some 20 billion units, according to IHS Markit estimates – the sheer scale of data generated in the future will render the current paradigm of a centralized cloud untenable. IoT edge processing saves upstream traffic and bandwidth by turning huge amounts of raw data into immediately usable decisions and directives to feed back to objects and devices downstream, and a much reduced and refined set of data to send upstream to data lakes and other decision-making systems. Barriers…