By Rory Murphy

 
The online media sector continues to grow at a rapid pace, fuelled by expansion in reach and speed of consumer broadband connections, alongside the proliferation of “connected” end user devices from laptops to smart TVs and tablets.

Here in Equinix Europe, we wanted to look more closely at this phenomenon and worked with specialist research outfit, IHS Screen Digest, to examine how the content and digital media market is evolving.

That research revealed that the media, gaming, gambling and advertising industries reached an aggregate €150bn in value across five European markets (UK, France, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland) in 2011.

But also that the increasingly complex set of relationships between online service deployments and supporting technologies now requires online service providers to have a host of communication needs with third party systems.

We certainly believe that creation of a sound platform can accelerate and maximise performance of businesses and indeed Equinix has already connected its media partners within its data centres, improving page load times and positively affecting quality of service, as well as reducing transit costs for the companies.

In future posts, we’ll reveal more from the research and describe how the evolution of the content and digital media ecosystem is having a real impact across the digital media industry.