Cisco just released its Visual Networking Index forecasting the global mobile data traffic over next five years. Here are some quick takes..

Exaponential Growth. Mobile data traffic worldwide will grow 39X in 5 years. By 2014 Cisco estimates the monthly data on mobile will average 3.6EB or exabytes. If you are going wow, what’s an exabyte – well it’s basically a million terabytes or a billion gigabytes. What’s more compelling is the dominance of video within this exponential growth (or should I say exaponential growth). 66% of all Mobile data traffic is going to be Video by 2014. Video dominance starts as early as next year, see below.

Consumers dominate mobile data traffic thanks in part to the video streaming smart phones. Mobile data traffic driven by consumers will go from 67% of total in 2009 to 73% of total in 2014; business users from 33% to 27% respective years. Besides the smart phones, major traffic hogs (mobile devices) will be mobile phone projectors (a.k.a. Picoprojectors) and laptops. This begs the question, won’t these mobile devices offload some of the traffic to Wi-Fi?

Wi-Fi offload of mobile data traffic over next five years seems to be net-zero at best, globally speaking. Per Cisco, while a significant amount of traffic will migrate from mobile to fixed networks, there will be much greater migration the other way around. Essentially, in many emerging countries such as India and Mexico the offload will decline during 2009-2014 while in developed nations the offload will rise. Remember only the dual-mode enabled mobile devices can offload from say 3G to Wi-Fi.

What this means to you? With so much demand you will likely get more data from a plan for your smart phone that costs you much less. The growth might also mean higher quality videos that load faster on your iPhone or Droid, for example.

With today’s advanced and often personal-sized technology, it’s possible for anyone to create, broadcast and share videos. Popular websites like YouTube are filled with millions of archived videos, some of which will be seen, but many of which won’t. We’re at the point in time where essentially anyone with a camera can become a broadcaster. But is anybody tuning in?

Archived video sites like YouTube are exploring live video through a limited number of events, but the rest of us are making do with posting “canned” videos that don’t exceed specific size limitations, and the like.  Granted, YouTube did get us all started on the video-over-the-Internet trend, but video can and is being leveraged for much more than static postings on a website. As we know from the mobile video solutions available today, people want live video with interactivity with the broadcaster. But these mobile solutions are hampered by low resolution, and less-than-ideal chat interactivity.  If consumers can get their hands on video sharing tools that are flexible, interactive and incorporate high-quality video, then it will help interpersonal communication move forward even faster.

My company Dyyno believes that what we’ve seen in terms of personal use of video is just the beginning of a much larger movement, and we’re here to do our part to help advance the democratization of video. Dyyno makes sharing video and any other application on your computer a snap and best of all, Dyyno makes it  free.  Share from your webcam, camcorder, or broadcast anything from your PowerPoint to your entire desktop. We’re making live video sharing a possibility, and we’ll be posting thoughts on what we’re seeing in the industry here, along with some practical examples of how people are using our platform.

Chabot College, a prominent community college in the San Francisco Bay Area has been able to use the Dyyno Personal Channel to capture and share images and videos from a single computer screen to tens of thousands of viewers.  They have been able to create how-to videos that include software training, cooking, exercise instruction and more. These videos for now reach over 90,000 viewers in the East Bay Area and will soon be available throughout California.  The Dyyno Personal Channel is so easy to use that Chabot College completely eliminated the typical behind-the-scenes tech work. You can do the same.

To end this first post in what we’ll make a fun, informative part of your time on the Internet, we invite you to try a free DPC for yourself. Give it a go at http://www.dyyno.com/signup.