Video remains one of the most popular mediums for content consumption in the world, but like all technologies, video tech is undergoing constant forms of evolution. Users can’t seem to get enough of it, with YouTube reporting a 100 percent increase in mobile video views every year, so what does the future hold for this technology with practically unlimited potential reach?

As evidenced by these online marketing rock stars, the most successful companies tend to be the ones who adopt the latest technology trends before their competitors, so you need to be proactive if you want to stay ahead of the curve.

Regardless of whether you’re trying to plan for your company’s next video marketing campaign, or if you’re just a consumer who wants to watch their favorite TV shows and YouTube channels more easily, you need to be ready for what’s next in video tech.

Video Tech Upgrades to Come

These are some of the most important ways video will evolve in the near future:

• Vertical videos. For years, almost all videos existed in landscape mode, thanks to movie theaters and televisions conditioning us to appreciate horizontal video. Vertical videos, which were easy to capture but offered a non-traditional mode of viewing, were once considered laughable and amateurish. Now, thanks to the vertical nature of our smartphones and recent pushes by apps like Snapchat, vertical videos are becoming more accepted and normalized. Expect to see more apps and trends that favor the development of vertical videos over their horizontal counterparts.
• Streaming feeds—everywhere. In the early days of the Internet, any kind of video streaming was choppy and unpredictable. Now, with mobile devices capable of relatively fast speeds and a camera in every user’s pocket, it’s likely that we’ll see an explosion in streaming capabilities over the course of the next few years. Apps like Facebook are already starting to take advantage of this with new streaming options, and users are highly engaged in this new mode of viewing. The next step is to see streams everywhere, thanks to affordable stationary cameras, more sophisticated mobile devices, and, of course, ever-rising user demand for more streaming video.
• Better quality and faster streaming. We’ll also see a step up in the quality and speed of streaming. The next phase of mobile connectivity, 5G, is expected to be rolled out by 2020 and will offer about five times the speeds we currently see with 4G technology. This should be no surprise, considering Internet speeds and mobile speeds seem to increase exponentially and predictably. 5G will accommodate better Internet of Things technology, but also faster video transmission—even as our cameras get better and more capable of streaming ultra-high definition images.
• Better storage and recall. Though we’ll be relying on streaming more and more in the near future, we also need better ways to store our videos and retrieve them for fast viewing. Cloud storage technology will become better in the future, but it still relies on physical storage on some level—that’s why new storage technologies like SMR and helium drives could help us make the next leap forward.
• 360 and immersive video. Virtual and augmented reality took massive steps forward in 2016, but they’re still technologies in their infancy. Headsets like Oculus are becoming more common, and 360-degree imagery and video is starting to enter the mainstream. Once VR headsets become the norm, and not the cutting-edge-new, we’ll see a sharp rise in both demand and capabilities for immersive videos.
• More intuitive search systems. Finally, we’ll start seeing more intuitive, comprehensive search systems to help people find the videos they need. This will branch into a number of different directions, including searches that scan the Web more thoroughly, better tagging features, better voice search systems, and even search functions that rely on visual cues to find related videos. As the number of videos online continues to grow exponentially, search systems that provide fast and accurate results will become even more necessary.

How to Plan for the Future

It’s hard to build a marketing strategy around a technology that hasn’t been released to the public, but there’s no harm in thinking ahead. Start planning video content that could take advantage of these new technologies, but are also feasible with modern equipment and apps. Trends build fast, so the more proactively you can think and plan, the better.