LIVE FROM HUAWEI GLOBAL ANALYST SUMMIT, SHENZHEN: Video will be the new cash cow for mobile operators, with the entertainment market opportunity alone estimated at $650 billion worldwide by 2020, according to Huawei’s X Lab Insights.

Ryan Ding, Huawei’s president of products and solutions (pictured), said operators in many markets are already rapidly monetising video services, such as high-definition streaming of sports events.

He gave the example of South Korean operator LG Uplus, which is delivering 2K live streaming of football and baseball games to smartphone customers, who are paying extra for high-quality, real-time content.

For the huge gaming market, Huawei works with mobile operators in China to significantly reduce buffering on existing 4G networks: “Gamers are happy to pay for lower latency,” he said.

In addition to entertainment, X Lab Insights forecasts the video communications segment at $18 billion by 2020, and use of video in vertical industries at $350 billion.

Video surveillance is the biggest vertical segment. To give an example of the scale in China, Beijing alone features 1.3 million CCTV cameras. China Mobile runs a project in Zhenjiang province monitoring everything from villages to restaurant kitchens and factories, with average revenue of $350 per camera each year.

Ding said Huawei saw little change in the video conferencing market in the past ten years.

He noted the bottleneck in monetising video is generally not doing the network optimisation, but rather the OSS/BSS integration. Operators in China are positioned to more quickly deploy a video platform and move content to CDNs than their counterparts in Europe, which have older legacy systems.

“Operators in China can optimise the video experience in a shorter time, while in Europe it could take 12 to 18 months.”

The success of video will be a key element in operators’ overall revenue growth over the next five years. X Labs Insights forecasts telco revenue to increase by between 3 per cent to 5 per cent annually until 2021, when it will reach $1.3 trillion.