We’ll see YouTube become integrated into more smart TV’s and with this its on-demand service takes off.

Netflix and LoveFilm fail to gain traction due to limited catalogue offering.

Apple manages to secure larger studio licencing agreements, scaling its own content.

According to Citrix Bytemobile analytics, in late 2012, YouTube traffic generated from mobile devices accounted for 25% of total data usage on networks, and mobile views have risen from 6% to 25% over the past 18 months. Citrix ByteMobile predicts that not only will video content double in volume in 2013, but also that its overall percentage of total mobile data traffic on networks will rise to 60%. Vodafone Germany, one of the frontrunners of LTE deployments in Europe, already found that 75% of its traffic was from video. Clearly, video and its supporting technology – smartphones, LTE networks and video optimization – will experience an increased demand in 2013. Nobody wants to watch a video of any kind that stalls 30 to 50 seconds for every 60 seconds of content. With more sophisticated smartphones on efficient, high capacity LTE networks, mobile subscribers can expect a consistently good user experience, but enhanced traffic management will be required to make best use of the additional data.

People will continue to see value in portability – as they possess more devices that can consume their content, they increasingly expect to be able to consume that content whenever and however they want to. The rise of subscription and streaming services has also spawned the beginnings of a ‘pay as you go’ mentality among content consumers. Innovative new services will see content owners generate increased revenue based on usage, as well as driving more value for subscribers by enabling them to pass content to one another.

Simultaneously, the growing trend of clothing and accessory rental, resale and swap platforms will see its peer-to-peer and professional aspects grow apace, as people band together to enable themselves to pay for what they want to wear, only as long as they want to wear it.

Currently DVD and Blu-ray sales account for a significantly higher percentage of Home Entertainment content than digital items purchased. This could be attributed to physical media being more widely available from many different sources, whereas the selection of online services is nascent.

Where online services are available, they often exist as subscription services allowing users to access a wide variety of content for a monthly fee; this content however is never owned by the users. The market share of SVOD models is set to decline over the next couple of years with transactional services predicted to dominate the OTT Global market share by 2017.

What is likely to reinforce the value of ownership and assist this shift of growing EST services, is the introduction of UltraViolet. This will enable users to physically buy a UV compatible item and then access it online, thus educating users on the concept of owning digital content in the cloud; similar to your DVD library on your living room shelves, but now the content is available on any device anytime, anywhere.

As UltraViolet currently only supports a purchase model we may see a market shift in how users are accessing content, and, according to recent estimates the percentage of EST revenue in the North American OTT market is set to increase from 8% to 13% from 2012 to 2017 whereas the SVOD market share is set to decline from 59% to 36% in the same period.

Subscription services will continue to keep those consumers who enjoy a wide variety of content (but aren’t concerned with owning it) happy, but if the predicted increase of EST revenue is accurate, it will be key for any digital retailer to support multiple models of content in order to keep up with the changes in consumer behaviour.

(ABI Research)