Companies like Skype and Google were successfully fostering novel forms of communication among online communities and potentially posed a major threat to core communications revenue, the report said.
Skype and similar voice over IP services could account for 5.4 per cent of the global fixed line telephony market in 2011.
Though growth among these VoIP providers had been seen as incremental, they would increasingly substitute for traditional communications services, the “Opportunities for Non-traditional Players in Communications Markets” report said.
“Online communities and portals create a market for communications that occupy a middle ground between one-to-one and one-to-many interactions,” the report’s author Stephen Sale said in a statement.
“The success of many of these services calls into question established ideas of user behaviour and suggests alternative means of addressing the communications market,” he said.
“Non-traditional players can capitalise on their presence online and in end-user devices to make inroads into telecoms companies’ core revenues.”
The market for content aggregation of on-demand video by online retailers is likely to be about US$820 million by 2011.
It also found that online players would fend off competition from direct-to-consumer portals – and the mobile sector – to take more than 60 per cent of the music aggregation market worth US$4.3 billion by 2011.
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