Gaming5 G Dreamstime L 77162694 5eea6461be671

Fueled by 5G, Watch Cloud Gaming and Video Take Off

June 17, 2020

We’ve been at home watching streaming video and gaming online for months, propelling rapid growth in 5G-related revenue that will continue to balloon. But who, ultimately, will benefit from it?

David Maliniak

The last six months only seem to have taken six years. Many of us have chafed under coronavirus quarantine and have headed out for protests (or tacos, or both), while others remain sequestered. Either way, we’ve been home a great deal of the time, with kids and family, and that’s meant a whole lot of video streaming and online gaming.

That’s good news for the broadband industry, and the party is just getting started. Last year saw the initial deployments of 5G for consumers, but this year will be one of large-scale commercial adoption of the technology. According to the global tech advisory firm ABI Research, 5G-generated revenues for cloud-based entertainment services are expected to skyrocket until at least 2024. By then, 5G will be the driving technology behind revenues of nearly $1.9 billion in cloud gaming (42% of overall cloud-gaming revenues), and some $67 billion in cloud video (31% of overall cloud-video revenues).

Social distancing, quarantines, and school closings have all contributed to the surge in demand for cloud-based entertainment. Across the globe, network traffic has been up an average of 15% or more, with platforms like YouTube and Netflix being major beneficiaries. Thus, network operators and infrastructure providers have ventured toward targeting enterprise use cases in the media and entertainment arenas.

If they’re to succeed in this direction, infrastructure vendors and network operators need to fully embrace a service-based monetizing strategy and depart from a capital expenditure-intensive model, say ABI’s analysts. Should the telecom industry fail in this tactic, they could find themselves losing out to the Google/Amazon/Netflix sorts of large cloud-services providers. It’ll be interesting over the next 12 to 18 months as this dynamic plays out and the (hopefully) post-COVID landscape materializes.

About the Author

David Maliniak | Executive Editor, Microwaves & RF

I am Executive Editor of Microwaves & RF, an all-digital publication that broadly covers all aspects of wireless communications. More particularly, we're keeping a close eye on technologies in the consumer-oriented 5G, 6G, IoT, M2M, and V2X markets, in which much of the wireless market's growth will occur in this decade and beyond. I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, developers, and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our contributor's packet, in which you'll find an article template and lots more useful information on how to properly prepare content for us, and send to me along with a signed release form.

About me:

In his long career in the B2B electronics-industry media, David Maliniak has held editorial roles as both generalist and specialist. As Components Editor and, later, as Editor in Chief of EE Product News, David gained breadth of experience in covering the industry at large. In serving as EDA/Test and Measurement Technology Editor at Electronic Design, he developed deep insight into those complex areas of technology. Most recently, David worked in technical marketing communications at Teledyne LeCroy, leaving to rejoin the EOEM B2B publishing world in January 2020. David earned a B.A. in journalism at New York University.