If you haven’t seen it, click through to this article from the New York Times entitled “Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam”.  In it, correspondent Steve Lohr notes that video on the web is a key factor driving internet demand to the point that — absent a huge increase in capacity — demand for bandwidth could approach capacity by 2011.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

The article notes, correctly, that the technology to compress and optimize flow of information around the net — effectively increasing the capacity of the internet infrastructure — is improving very rapidly as well.  And even if capacity comes under strain, the effects are likely to be felt as “brown-outs” rather than blackouts — that is, slow-downs due to congestion, concentrated in certain regions and dayparts.

Nonetheless, it is a reminder once again that we are at this time beneficiaries of a perfect storm of benefits: the need to fill over-built bandwidth from the internet boom keeps access prices down, and the land-grab for customers and eyeballs by video content services is keeping video hosting costs down (or even free).  Those factors will disappear over the next few years, and we’ll start to see the true economic cost of bandwidth and hosting reflected in the pricing.

Those of us with a long-range view for our content initiatives need to keep the long-term economics in mind, even as we’re enjoying the short-term benefits of a pricing boon.