Earlier this week, former Wall Street analyst turned venture capital tech guru Mary Meeker presented KPCB’s annual (and highly influential) Internet Trends Report. It was 197 slides that could be best described as the unofficial temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate of the Internet economy.
The scope of the deck was wide, covering everything from advertising trends to emerging economies. From our perspective, six slides stood out, highlighting the growth, evolution and future of broadband, video entertainment, and the changing Internet marketplace.
The fact that user-controlled content has increased exponentially in the last ten years not only proves the rapid evolution of the Internet’s ability to manage multimedia content, it shows that competition for eyeballs (not to mention consumer media budgets) is fierce and growing fiercer.
Public Internet companies, once a niche industry, now have a market cap in the trillions. 11 of the top 15 are US-based companies, showing how well the American private industry broadband model is working.
The pace of Internet traffic is swift and steady. Not only does this slide reveal how intense the increased pressure video traffic is placing on our networks, it proves mobile is a viable wireline broadband alternative.
It’s not a huge surprise, but it’s still compelling to look at just how much more time we spend consuming content on mobile devices. As TV Everywhere technology and services expand and improve, we’ll see even more consumption on “vertical screens.”
The significant increase in Internet connectivity is in huge part because of the rapid expansion of nationwide broadband networks. Cable broadband, for example, is available to 93 percent of American homes.
An increasing trend in Internet access equals an increasing trend in e-commerce. More people have more opportunities to do more business in more places with fewer barriers. This is perhaps the most important promise of the Internet.
See Mary Meeker’s full slide presentation here:
2015 Internet Trends Report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers