Umpteen Yottabytes of Online Video

Streaming video is rapidly becoming the Internet’s predominant data type, according to this article in the New York Times about scientists who are mapping the evolving shape of this anarchic network.

Here's an amazing statistic that caught our attention:

"When we started releasing data publicly, we measured it in petabytes of traffic,” said Doug Webster, a Cisco Systems market executive who is responsible for an annual report by the firm that charts changes in the Internet. “Then a couple of years ago we had to start measuring them in zettabytes, and now we’re measuring them in what we call yottabytes.”

One petabyte is equivalent to one million gigabytes. A zettabyte is a million petabytes. And a yottabyte is a thousand zettabytes. The company estimates that video will account for 90 percent of all Internet traffic by 2013.