The Internet and the trends in over-the-top (OTT) services is the last of the three areas whose 2022 fortunes I’m going to blog about. Far from the least important, but perhaps the most difficult to predict. In fact, to predict pure OTT factors is as difficult as predicting taste in music, so I’m not going there. Instead, what I’ll focus on is the areas where significant shifts in Internet-think might create significant shifts in network infrastructure and services. I’ll sum up all of the forces covered here and in the two blogs earlier this week, in my first blog of the New Year, which will be my next blog since I’m taking a break until January 4th, 2022.
The majority of network traffic is created by use of the Internet. The Internet, as a means of reaching customers and partners, is also the primary driver of cloud consumption, not only for enterprises but as the delivery mechanism for what’s usually called “OTT” services, including streaming video and social media. We’ve seen sharp changes in the use of these services through the pandemic so far, and the Street is now focused (not surprisingly) on what web players and trends will dominate as COVID becomes less of an issue, both socially and financially.
There are two trends that the Street sees as impacting the Internet through 2022, one more evolutionary one more revolutionary. The former is characterized in Street research as “Web 3”, which is a (many would say, vast) oversimplification of the technical model that’s been given that name. The latter, of course, is the “metaverse”.
Web 3 (or 3.0, or Web3, as it’s variously known in technical circles) is a major shift in the Internet designed to build around an identity-security-and-trust model. Think of blockchains ruling the world and you have a notion of what we’re talking about. I blogged about Web 3 HERE, but the Street is thinking about it less as a technology shift than a response to specific problems with Internet security, identity, and monetization. Or, just perhaps, the Street is just into the hype game. In any event, the scope of impact for “true” Web 3 technology would be so substantial that there is zero chance anything would come of it in 2022, so what I suggest is that the Street is thinking about more band-aid-like changes made to the three areas I mentioned.
The metaverse is another area where the Street is oversimplifying; indeed, it completely misses the full scope of technical changes required. They see it as something an OTT player like Meta (Facebook) could drive on their own, when in fact the creation of a global virtual world would demand major changes in computing and networking. I’ve also blogged about the metaverse (HERE and HERE), and you can reference these pieces for the details on just what has to happen.
Before we look at these trends, let’s look at the baseline. COVID has likely forever altered our tradeoff between the real world and the online world. Many of our youth have long been as much or more citizens of the virtual world as they have of the real, but lockdowns and simple fear of contagion have turned many toward online shopping a virtual visiting. We will see some relaxation of the drivers of this shift in 2022, but Omicron makes it clear that we’re unlikely to be free of COVID risks even in 2023. Maybe never.
The battles for TV carriage, fought by device vendors like Roku, networks and entertainment companies, and streaming TV services, are a demonstration that people have accustomed themselves to getting video in their living room instead of going out to see it. Live events like concerts still draw the young, generally less concerned about infection, but even sporting events have been hit by the fear factor. In this environment, everyone wants virtual eyeballs, and there’s a strong shift away from pure ad sponsorship to payment for content.
This is all creating the on-ramp for our evolutionary and revolutionary issues, of course. If more money is going to be spent online, then there’s more need for security and identity support, and monetization is a whole new game if content is more important. If people are going to interact virtually, there’s a strong desire to move beyond talking heads and group meetings where every new attendee makes the size of everyone’s face smaller and smaller. The Web 3 and metaverse moves are two different paths to the same destination, a future where what’s online is just as important—and maybe more important—than what’s real. We will not achieve this future (either by evolution or revolution) in 2022 or 2023, but we will almost surely see steps toward it, and those steps will define the technology shifts that the Street will validate, and that means the companies whose fortunes will advance. The big question will be the extent to which “revolutionary” metaverse developments will percolate beyond simply creating the OTT framework for metaverse presentation.
Creating a more identity-centric online experience is clearly going to have to be driven by a combination of the public cloud providers and the other companies who have significant positions in consumer trust and e-commerce. As it happens, of course, the top companies in both areas are the same—Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—but I’d also add Apple to the mix because the iPhone is so pervasive. These four companies, by providing both tools to build more identity-centric, secure, online applications, are the most likely to lead the evolutionary charge. However, they may end up buying smaller players who come up with something truly innovative.
The metaverse area is a lot more complicated, particularly when you consider the issues I raised in my past blogs on the topic. The value of the metaverse increases significantly with the “realism” of its experience, meaning the extent to which avatars and environments in the metaverse closely track the things they represent. Any OTT, including Meta, could frame the presentation side of the metaverse, but that doesn’t address the challenge of distributing a worldview of a single locale to a set of people who are inhabiting multiple, widely separated, places in the real world.
The question in our Internet-revolution area is whether the presentation side (the social-media types) will redefine computing and networking to erase the geographic-separation barrier, or whether cloud providers (or other players, in theory) will solve the separation problem and provide metaverse-building tools that will then address the presentation side. Which path we take will have an enormous impact on our future, on technology evolution through all of IT, and on vendor fortunes. What it boils down to is whether a “metaverse” is a social network or an application.
Meta is surely capable of creating a true, highly integrated, metaverse that is “multi-tenant” in that it contains “groups” that are communities unto themselves. They’d have to deploy a lot of additional servers and build a pretty strong mesh network, but it could be done. If they did it, they’d likely tap off much of the metaverse opportunity, and they could end up being what is effectively a network and cloud provider of metaverse-specific resources. Others, meaning my four evolution giants, would have to try to gain entry into the space against a strong incumbent.
But would Meta spend to build infrastructure on that scale? Even to cover the US market would be a massive infrastructure investment for them. If they didn’t move with incredible speed, their steps would telegraph a warning to others, particularly the four evolutionary giants, and they’d likely move themselves. Without a significant first-mover advantage, Meta would have to ask itself whether it would be better to host on someone else’s “metacloud” or build their own. If some of the Cloud-Three of the Evolutionary-Four were to move aggressively, they could make metaverse hosting the premier edge application, and if they meshed their own edge facilities, they could be the leading provider of network services other than the access piece.
The reason for the “could be” here is that the impact on network services would depend on the extent to which metaverses became a common framework in social networking, collaboration, customer support, and so forth. It would also depend on just how aggressively Meta pursued the use of their metaverse framework as a means of addressing overall metaverse opportunities. Finally, it would depend on whether other players, especially my Big Four evolutionary players, decided to compete directly in metaverse hosting.
These question marks are critical in understanding what might happen to today’s vendors, cloud providers, and network operators. Meta is a champion of open-model computing and networking, and to the extent that they build out infrastructure for the metaverse, they’ll undoubtedly use an open approach, meaning traditional server and network vendors won’t get much out of the deal. Public cloud providers would be likely to build a lot of their own server/network gear too, so the “revolution” of the metaverse would be more revolutionary if Meta or the cloud providers built it.
The evolutionary path, the path that would preserve current incumbencies in services and equipment, would be if network operators stepped up. That could (in theory) happen in two ways. First, the operators could start deploying carrier cloud, meaning edge computing and metro networking. They could mesh their own metro areas, and they could support interconnects (as they do now) in the form of peering agreements to mesh the meshes, so to speak. Second, they could decide to create the transport relationships needed for metro meshing and forget the hosting.
Operators should have started to invest in carrier cloud three years ago, if they wanted to optimize their own long-term position in the market. They didn’t, and I don’t see them suddenly getting aggressive in that area now. Even the mesh-transport initiative seems far-fetched to me, given that that they’d be creating a new transport network focused on high capacity and low latency that, unless the metaverse opportunity developed quickly, wouldn’t return any new revenue to them.
What could tip the scales here is the equipment vendors, both computing and networking. A shift to open-model networking for metaverse hosting would be a disaster for them, tapping off what would surely be the largest source of new revenue and even slowly eroding their current revenue by displacing current Internet technologies in favor of the new. Network operators don’t invent network technologies (even when they try, they just don’t have the mindset; look at NFV or ONAP). If vendors were to create a viable strategy for metaverse hosting, it wouldn’t guarantee operators would adopt it, but it might facilitate adoption when the risks to operator business models becomes clear.
Which might happen in 2022. Right now, everything in our revolutionary-Internet pathway depends on just how fast metaverse catches on. Operators respond more to competition than to opportunity; they have a history of presuming demand is there to be exploited, and that it’s just a question of whether anyone besides them is in a position to do that. If we were to see Meta moving very quickly, see a lot of interest developing, see players like Microsoft and Google starting off their own processes to host metaverses, then operators might start getting concerned. Combine that with vendor strategies they could adopt rather than having to invent them, and carrier cloud might be off to the races.
There will be more Internet in 2022. There will likely be signals of differences developing, too, and some of the signals may be strong enough to start bringing about market changes. As always, what we should look for are signs that up-and-coming players are jumping on one of the trends I’ve noted here, to gain some first-mover advantage. If that happens, and if those players do their singing and dancing well enough, we might actually see progress in some or all these areas by the time 2023 rolls around. Meanwhile, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!